[kevingadd]

That's just backface and/or frustum culling, likely being done by the N64's equivalent of the hardware transform unit or the rasterizer. Completely separate matter from visibility culling which is usually done at a very coarse level - objects, rooms, etc. Not individual triangles. It's true that game consoles typically had better culling capability of this sort built in, since without it games wouldn't have acceptable performance.

When a scene contains a truckload of triangles, culling them all one at a time like that does not win you as much performance as you might think. You always needed to do additional things on top of it.