Yeah, nice assets can really make a difference, the thing is you can pull twice as much polygons in the same scene with Unreal Engine (oversimplyfing)
http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/projects/pacman-benchmark/thesis-co...
http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/projects/pacman-benchmark/thesis-co...
FWIW it's a good piece of code, and i like it.