Apparently even more so with the latest release.
Chaos is a mess. The latest version actually has an ~200% performance loss on physics.
GFX is a mess. The latest release lost 20fps for many projects.
The new features are a mess. There’s nothing but forum posts with “water don’t work”, “clouds don’t cloud”, Reflections don’t reflect. Etc. Etc. Etc.
To top it off there’s about 100 features they added as experimental, messed around with for a while, and left there unfinished. Including but not limited to real time texturing, the new hair groom which somehow apparently they called production ready, sub surf scattering has needed a .usf fix for about 3 official releases (over half a year)… etc. Could pile on issues I have either dealt with or have to live with for a full day.
I’m not sure there’s any hope of getting any official support for real time terrains or any feature request at all.
So, study. Make your own.
If you can pick, I think an octree implementation will outperform most voxel plugins avaliable. At least. My own experiments are rather promising.
Overall the performance drops for other reasons like the engine wanting to load 100% of a mesh that is 10% on screen… when dealing with the default landscape this is particularly demanding and I would say the base cause of poor performance. According to what has been shown in the ue5 preview this won’t be an issue eventually.