It sounds like they need to implement easy to use Level of Detail (LOD) and progressive meshes. 100,000 vertices on far away objects will break most rendering pipelines that do not somehow reduce them. 100,000 complicated matrix interactions instead of the like, 8, it probably takes really far away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_grap...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_meshes