on 3dgs commercial bona animation is slow, so I must use vertex, with model lod its performance can be improved remarkably. earlier when I dealt with this optimization area, there were some engine bugs with setting clipped or far entities to non-animated, but I reported and it's now correct, so I'll deal with it after finishing my editor update.
in contrary, in Esenthel engine only bone animation is available, but it's done on the GPU (like in 3dgs pro), so it is fast as hell beside smoothly working very-very high quality pssm shadows with nice self-shadows, and very fast in deferred rendering mode. in 3DGS deferred rendering user contributions are unfortunately so slow...

using less trees and decrease poly count is a possibility but means lower quality.