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If I'm not mistaken, isn't that what the 3D graphics cards do for you, that is do all the drawing of objects for you? I don't believe that EQ program has to take into account your position relative to all the other objects and draw what is appropriate. My understanding is that the EQ program simply tells the graphics card the position of all the "objects" and your current position, and the driver and firmware for the card take care of the rest, including knowing which objects are behind other objects and therefore shouldn't be rendered on the screen.
You are mistaken... read any book on 3D graphics.. when graphics cards can do realtime object occlusion, the world will be a wonderful place... For now, they do z-buffering to decide what objects are in front, but in order to do that, they still have to render (atleast partially) all of the triangles in the scene...