I like your video game view of mesh counts, and I assume you're also including clipping as a special case of a 0-count mesh. And since we're programmers, I thin

I like your video game view of mesh counts, and I assume you're also including clipping as a special case of a 0-count mesh. And since we're programmers, I think there is another very useful vocabulary to use when talking about this: Eager vs lazy. When I open a tree view, it doesn't have to eagerly evaluate all of the contents of each node. It gives you the nodes that you are looking at and you have a decision as to what you want to open. This is precisely analogous to what you "pay attention to". So the "tricks" that you mention could be thought of in terms of lazy evaluations.