Does it make sense to put some esoteric graphics features which just a minority of people can appreciate before engine key feature such as fps ?
In my opinion it is simply ridicolous
I understand you perfectly. And because of that I always admire the amount of optimizations they put in to still render fast even with nice graphics enabled. I already mentioned how Unity switches between dynamic and static lighting, how it switches between pixel, vertex and hs lighting. And then there is occlusion culling to only render what you see. All this allows to scale, to render fast even with nice graphics enabled.
The same counts for UDK. I mean they use static maps for almost everything. But those maps contain the direction of light to influence normals and specularity. It is a very old-school technique, just like old Quake lightmapping but with some tricks to look modern.
The Source engine from Valve is similar, it uses lightmaps, zones and portals and still it can render tons of polygons and graphical effects in each zone, it supports modern post processing effects and it scales very well, it runs on PC, Mac, old and new hardware.
So from my point of view there is absolutely no problem to include modern graphical features, if it scales good. I realized that modern engines all use Ambient Occlusion and it really renders fast today. They optimized it a lot.
