It handles ALL of those things as well as can be expected so long as you’re sensible… throwing statements around about how the renderer isn’t optimized is false and after you do it for long enough, insanely irritating too. I mean look at the Kite demo, a stable, solid 30 FPS on my modest home PC - which is FINE for a foliage-heavy game where you literally have 100 square kilometers of transluscent grass (and heightfield GI)! I garauntee if you drop the kite demo into any engine, the gaps in it’s renderer will be exposed. Even Paragon had high-density foliage in it’s first map in some areas, made heavy use of POM & tessalation and a fairly large environment and it ran at 60, AND it was scaled for PS4 and is probably the best looking game I’ve ever seen.
Until UE4 has dynamic GI we can’t make an objective desicion as to which looks better without baked. UE4 is less ‘strict’ than CryEngine, the latter of which has been catered to foliage-heavy, small-environment FPS games for years upon years. It stands to reason they might have a good foliage rendering technique. If that suits your project better, why not use Cry instead? Some engines are better at certain things than others, that’s just a given.
If certain features run faster in other engines than they do Unreal, that’s totally expected isn’t it? No one engine is going to do everything perfectly. Anyway, Wright said they are working to squeeze the last out of the renderer over a year ago. I’m a million percent certain it can always be optimized further - but rendering engineers are hard to come by and at Epic they’re spread pretty thin across many projects.
Plus mod or not, I’m only human and the constant complaining takes it toll sometimes - especially if nobody has anything constructive or suggestive to say and uses OP’s question as a chance to moan.
EDIT: Man I need a Beer or ten.