[barrettcolin]

Broadly speaking, simpler is better on modern CPUs and GPUs. Testing an array of spheres against a view frustum is cache friendly, can be sped up considerably using SIMD instructions and is easily parallelizable. Submitting superfluous data to a GPU is not generally impactful; GPUs are clever at not drawing stuff that doesn't actually contribute (with clipping and depth buffer rejection) and extremely fast in their own right.