NPC draw distance

[Source1]

Besides the lack of players, ones of the things that made VG seem so empty was the short npc draw distance. Is this something that is controlled server side? Flying npcs have a much longer draw distance and I think that certain high level raid npcs also had it.

[Xen]

The server can determine which NPC's are sent to the client, so an NPC that is very far away can be sent so the client knows where it's at. However, I'm not sure if there is a draw distance limit built into the client somewhere.

[Xinux]

We can send all the spawns from a chunk at once to the client but it does have a draw distance check in there somewhere and yes some things appear further away then other for instance houses show up at a greater distance then npc's.