Games don't face an impossible amount of data. It might look like an impossible amount of data, but they play all sorts of cheats. In you have a crowd with 8k p

Games don't face an impossible amount of data. It might look like an impossible amount of data, but they play all sorts of cheats. In you have a crowd with 8k people, there might be 50 animations being computed and shared between the rest of the skeletons. All members of the staff -- environment artists, character artists, level designers, animators, FX artists -- are all very technical and have the power and wisdom to use the framerate wisely. I'm not even sure why you're bringing up frustum culling -- you're suggesting that we have too many objects to run the cull math on so we schedule across frames? But we don't; that results in visual popping. If culling is a bottleneck, we usually solve by broad-phase data structures like octrees, or ask the artists to condense multiple separate models into one so we have less objects to manage (another big cheat, artist labor).