[ncallaway]

"Camera is far away is it just wouldn't get rendered" is...not quite right.

If the view-frustrum of the camera includes the model, it will typically get rendered.

What typically save performance in these games is a system called "LOD" or "Level of Detail". This typically means that an asset (say the 3D model of the citizen) might have a few different qualities of 3D model. One "high quality" model that should be used when the character is close to the camera, a medium quality one when the character is kinda-far, and a super low quality one when the character is way off in the distance.

What the tweet and screenshot reddit post are claiming is that this LOD system is not present for these citizen characters, so when one is far away, they are still rendering using the high quality model. The GPU still needs to do all of the rendering work required to draw the high-quality model, even if it ends up being far away.