I can say it is nothing new. I have written and seen many patents that describe systems that do that.

As far as the "predicate they are searching" the video mentioned nothing about the predicate other than it is for things that are visible, and that is nothing new.

They could just be being glib. Clipping and LOD aren't the same thing as one another. Consider the 2-D case of sampling a line (uncountably many points) for a raster display. Reimagining our favorite line drawing algorithms as search problems requires a lot of work to figure out how to best search the space. I hope these guys are doing something like that.