In general I agree. But there is hope!
On trello:
There is new section for open world support.
One of the biggest performance hitters in open world are shadows map. Try reducing distance of shadows map to something small like 1500, and instead use ray traced shadows.
Shadow maps have more or less fixed vertex cost, while performance of ray traced shadow is in pixel. The further the shadow is the less space it takes ergo it cost less.
Also trryto disable early z-pre pass. It could save you 2 or 3ms. (r.EarlyZPass=0).
I do not really have good know-how about rendering but looking at end results similarly complex scenes in both UE4 and CryEngine 3, the CryEngine 3 seems to perform like 100% better. And to be perfectly honest it still looks better in terms of shading and lighting. Not much, but there is still edge to CE3.
For example in UE4 my not so complex scene (there is not even foliage in it!) have about 40fps. And there nothing that would justify that performance. I tried to look trough various stat commands and biggest offender seemed (after dynamic lighting or even slightly higher) occlusion culling. Of course disabling OC, increases cost of rendering, which doesn’t give any performance gains.
Similiar scene in CE3 have about 80fps.
Edit:
Of course I’m talking about dynamic lighting. I refuse to lightmaps on anything bigger than house interior. Lightmaps in open enviroment only adds time, add memory usage (big!), doesn’t really any quality benefits.
I’m all for some precomputed solution. As long as it doesn’t require lightmaps and allow for real-time lighting changes.