blender Multible Objects optimization

GTX 970
6/12core i7 4GHZ
16GB DDR4 memory
SSD for cashing

okay so, im doing a scene, with a lot of foliage, but each card became its own object, 80000 of them in fact.
Game engines can handle several hundred thousands in real time…
the polycount of the entire scene is 500k which is not a lot

but adding those cards made bleder freeze for up to 10 minutes, and when it finally responded, it lagged beyond what ive ever seen.
i suspect that if i join them all into 1 object, it will stop the lag, but im literally unable to join them together due to the stuttering.

is this just extremely poor optimization from Blenders side? or is something wrong?
it seems to be completely unable to handle a high number of objects.

Sidenote, the objects were generated with a particle system, i dont know if that makes a difference.