Just found this interesting article, talking about specular lighting using cubemaps. It has a bit of a survey on what recent engines use and then goes into details of an interesting algorithm (also presented at SIGGRAPH2012).
I only got 1/3 of the way before my head was spinning with info 
Intresting, for mostly static levels.
Another approach i have seen is, to have EACH! important object a local cubemap, while all unimportant objects use the zone based approach, then the local cubemap is rebuild every nth frame. Dynamic performance can be archieved, by lowerng the resolution for further away cubemaps, and their rerender frequency. The intresting part is , that it is able to work for moving lights as well, eg a car.