I don't think it would accomplish much. But sure, you can precompute which objects are visible in which circumstances and do some culling based on that data.
My understanding is that the problem is that there's just too much stuff that you have to keep in memory if you don't use LoD to distinguish between nearby and far away objects.
What are you going to cull? There's just too much stuff to load in memory. Too much stuff that actually ends up on your screen. Too much point cloud data. Now games use low resolution models and prerendered billboards for far away objects. With a voxel octree you're just SOL, no matter how clever your spatial optimizations.
Unless hard drives (or SSDs) become a few orders of magnitude faster I don't see how the data can be fetched from disk quickly enough.
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I don't think it would accomplish much. But sure, you can precompute which objects are visible in which circumstances and do some culling based on that data.
My understanding is that the problem is that there's just too much stuff that you have to keep in memory if you don't use LoD to distinguish between nearby and far away objects.
Consider this screenshot from rage: http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/116/1162072/rage-201...
What are you going to cull? There's just too much stuff to load in memory. Too much stuff that actually ends up on your screen. Too much point cloud data. Now games use low resolution models and prerendered billboards for far away objects. With a voxel octree you're just SOL, no matter how clever your spatial optimizations.
Unless hard drives (or SSDs) become a few orders of magnitude faster I don't see how the data can be fetched from disk quickly enough.