You're wrong. You don't need to know what's visible ahead of time because you can load the tree lazily on demand. Voxels lend themselves naturally to perfect LOD scaling in a way exactly analogous to how mipmaps and megatextures work for 2D textures. There is no analogous algorithm for polygons; polygon mesh LOD is a very hard problem that is solved only imperfectly today and with a huge labor overhead for both artists and programmers. John Carmack himself has proposed voxels as a solution to this problem: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/John-Carmack-id-...
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You're wrong. You don't need to know what's visible ahead of time because you can load the tree lazily on demand. Voxels lend themselves naturally to perfect LOD scaling in a way exactly analogous to how mipmaps and megatextures work for 2D textures. There is no analogous algorithm for polygons; polygon mesh LOD is a very hard problem that is solved only imperfectly today and with a huge labor overhead for both artists and programmers. John Carmack himself has proposed voxels as a solution to this problem: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/John-Carmack-id-...