You can fine-tune the quality of the rendered surface by adjusting the settings in the Tessellation section of the subdivision surface Attribute Editor. Subdivision surfaces also support displacement mapping.
You can potentially create very finely tessellated polygons. As an extreme example, a Uniform tessellation of a 10 quad base mesh, with Depth and Sample Count set to 10 will produce about a billion triangles.
Format
Select one of the tessellation methods.
Adaptive tessellation produces a polygon with an equal number of faces for each of the finest level faces on the subdivision surface. The more refinement you’ve made to a region of the subdivision surface, the more faces the resulting polygon will have for that same region. Use Sample Count to increase the tessellation.