Thanks for nice comparison. I’d to ask few more questions then 
Is it possible to easily compare in-game performance to? I see there’s more materials but SpeedTree provide some shader operations AFAIK? Isn’t there any gain from that? Or any other features of SpeedTree can’t be seen as seen object param?
And does 4k difference in tris is that important if we’re batching all foliage in… well… foliage system?
Also, I noticed that you used tree from free SpeedTree package. In theory it should well optimized mesh, what if it’s not? And toolset gives options to optimize the content?
Just asking a lot of questions because I was simply used to artists using (or wanted to use) SpeedTree. It’s tool that was only by bigger studios for many years. Now it’s easily available for small teams thanks to Unity and Unreal. So I assumed it should be quite optimized if it was used for many “prev gen console” games.
Well, maybe even CDP, Bethesda, Bioware, DICE (also part of EA) don’t have enough manpower to create foliage manually if they need create loads of plants. Is it possible that difference in actual game performance isn’t that huge?
Maybe just SpeedTree with Unreal don’t work that well? Which wouldn’t be surprising