couple things going on here.
The user created stuff isn't the problem. In a dense population area my vert buff is only hitting 5-7k. <-- this is super low. On a modern game, the main character can be 12-25k verts, while the whole scene can go as high as 2-5 million verts.
The problem is in the engine. The engine isn't optomized to run on newer hardware. I had an old gtx670 (3 year old card) that would play this game in the oculus rift, between mid-high, and get 80fps. Out of the rift i was seeing fps in the 120 range.
My current system is an i7-4770k, gtx TitanX 12gb vram, 32gb system ram. Massive upgrade from my old system, so you would expect better fps. However, on the absolute lowest settings im getting about 30fps. If i push the system to anything above mid, my fps drops to about 12-17.
So IF it is the user created stuff that is unoptomized and hard to run, explain to me how a 3 year old gtx 670 was getting 100+fps while a brand new TitanX maxes out around the mid 30fps on the lowest settings?