Many world objects are automatically hidden if you move away from them, freeing the engine resources that had been used to render them.
Hiding an object will also hide its shadows and occluders.
The distance at which this happens is controlled by the forceAutoHideDistance property of each world node:
This probably corresponds directly to the nearAutoHideDistance in the proxy mesh ndoes below?
Proxy meshes
There is a specialized node type for world proxy meshes: the worldGenericProxyMeshNode. (Which raises the question if there are specialized / extended worldXXProxyMeshNodes?)