Sure, but no matter what the geometry/bump maps/etc. are on the road, they're not going to render out as anything but an aliased, badly-lit mess unless you're h

Sure, but no matter what the geometry/bump maps/etc. are on the road, they're not going to render out as anything but an aliased, badly-lit mess unless you're heavily supersampling them (and then doing ray-tracing to the supersampled image.) We're talking about "objects" where the crucial detail-features of their meshes for getting correct color math out (e.g. the normal+reflectance maps) would be, on average, scaled to be smaller than a pixel from the viewing distance+angle, with potentially many objects contributing to the final color of each pixel. So, rather than rendering the road at 8x-16x and then downsampling it, in order to get a pile of leaves to appear to have ~1.5x LoD at the projection plane, you can just achieve that 1.5x LoD pixel by pixel at the projection plane. Or, to put that another way: when a digital artist is painting a landscape, they don't have to zoom in by 8x, paint every individual blade of grass, and then zoom out. They can just use an artistic technique at 1x zoom that approximates the texture that would have been created by downsampling "photographic" detail painted in at 8x to your screen resolution. Here, the ML model is playing the role of the digital artist, "painting" on the projection plane.