No. I’m using the one from Desktop package which is the same as yours.
You are talking about limits that only apply to editor visual slider. Real cascade number limit is 10 not 4. For distance there is no practical limit. Just click the field and type number that you want. Every value in UE4 editor has two limits. There is Slider limit and value limit.
On my crappy old laptop:
when i open the simple third person template in Unreal Engine 4.15 preview1 i got 9 Fps onlyyyy (High Settings)! (Only the Manequin model and some Boxes around)!!
In Cryengine 2 Sandbox Editor when i open the complete Island Level from Crysis 1 Game (With hundreds of Trees,objects,particles,Ocean,Volumetric Clouds,Textures,et.also (High Settings)…i get 25 Fps!!!Whoah
In 4.15P1 there is actually a bug that forces all foliage to stay on LOD0, but I’m guessing that Maximum-Dev tested with 4.14, so this should not be relevant here.
@Maximum-Dev You should compare with a similar sun position. On your cryengine screenshot you see the shadows cover roughly 30% of the ground, while in UE4 they cover almost 100%.
Im guessing they missed the part where the artist said they resolved the issue and there was something wrong with the scene other than the trees. The comparison shots look nothing like the same tree either even if they are so Im guessing when someone knows one engine better than another that will have some bearing of what they are able to achieve with either.
You did, you jumped on the renderer as the cause of the problem and the OP has said it wasnt the case! Its nothing about you personally, its nothing to do with Cryengine… this is an UE forum and youre welcome to bring your Cryengine knowledge to the table but its clear your measly 2 years have nothing on my 15yrs with UE, again I didnt say you were entirely wrong just that your attitude sucked and that you have a clear bias. The engine is optimized but you need to understand whats going on underneath more before you can make unfounded statements about the lighting and shadowing being completely unoptimized for ALL circumstances, if you were commenting directly in regards to foilage perhaps you should explain what techniques Cryengine employs that UE4 doesnt, this way you can add those same techniques to UE4 and give a fair comparison 
http://puu.sh/ttN4m/873b0bb324.jpg
I actually think UE4 has the better fidelity there!
I’m pretty sure any of these loose comparisons is pretty useless. The first pic from cryengine the trees were spread out to the horizon line both sides of the screen. The one from UE (from a different user) had them all bunched up in the middle. Regardless of the technical details of the scenes (shadowing, total polygons, occluded polygons, whatever) it’s a VERY different visual effect. Visual effect is all that actually matters here isn’t it? e.g. Same tree model, same LOD, same visual coverage, same lighting?
Don’t get me wrong, I love comparisons, and rendering lots of foliage in UE is maybe a bit more like wrestling a bull than it should be. But unless you can recreate a scene with the same tree (same LOD), roughly the same spacing and camera angles, same looking shadows (basically matching visual result) it isn’t very easy to see if there’s any meaningful difference here? It just becomes a bunch of people counting polys/fps and arguing subjective opinions about the engines, especially when the visual results aren’t even in the same state as each other.
Yes, UE4 looks far better here. The cryengine screenshot actually looks like its all billboards.
Also, you have to keep in mind that speedtree has quite some stuff enabled by default that eats a lot of performance. Mostly the speedtree wind, you definitely have to disconnect that for all materials (not just the leaves) and also the color variation which aren’t few nodes when you look at it, so those also eat performance. And you definitely see that cryengine has no color variation there.
Yeah its hard to do a 1:1 comparison I bet and I am willing to give CryEngine the benefit of the doubt since it does seem more optimized for purpose, UE4 has gotten significantly better already with early versions not even supporting foliage options much at all.
I have no doubts that speedtree comes with its own set of issues and one I typically see in games is really horrible attempts at wind in both shaders and tree skeletons (if thats the correct term), I would actually go with the option of no wind until you are absolutely sure you even require it and have room for the overhead that comes with, its one of those eye candy features that doesnt typically impact gameplay in the slightest.
Its really all about trade offs thats what I like to say, its rare for a game to have the ability to crank every part of the engine to 11! An example might be using SubSurface Scattering with Translucency to get really nice high detailed individually modeled leaves which correctly filter the light and show the veins but having a scene with a big forest and trying to have all the leaves look that good will most certainly kill your framerate (be lucky if it doesnt crash tbh). If you batch them add some nice lodding textures which only do the SSS up close then you immediately see benefits and thats the type of flexibility in development UE4 provides, unfortunately it has a similar issue to CPP in that it allows you to write amazing stuff but it also allows you to make huge mistakes