Foliage system vs. static meshes with LODs for performance

Development World Creation
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We are working on using Unreal as a visualization tool. So I have a scene file (from another software), that is simply a XML-file that contains all the foliage (trees and bushes) and their position and rotation. Now I just need to place the meshes in the Unreal scene in the same places. My question is; is there any performance magic going on under the hood of the foliage system so 5000 trees inside the foliage system is performing better then 5000 instances of the same tree as static mesh in the scene?
Or is the foliage system just a convenient way of placing the static meshes with paint tools? Because then we don’t need it since we just have to write code that reads the XML data and spawns actors that way. But if it is a significant performance boost of using the foliage system, then perhaps it’s till worth looking into…

Cheers!

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Foliage system is taking advantage of instanced static meshes, thus outperforming conventional static meshes considerably, however you can create a blueprint or code so that you read your file and spawn foliage accordingly.

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@Deathrey So when creating static meshes via code, they come in individual meshes, and not instances of each other?
Is there no way of using instanced static meshes outside of the foliage system? What if I want to populate a parking lot with lots and lots of cars, or if I want to have street lights alongside the road, should I use the foliage system for that as well?

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