High poly mesh vs displace for static geo?

The way I see it, using a very high polycount model should be fairly easy on the GPU to render but I have difficulties loading the mesh into UE4. I’m still waiting for it to load since yesterday (1mega tri). I understand that UE4 should be able to manage such a mesh but I can’t get why it takes so long to load. It makes the workflow really painful.

By the way, I tried loading the bigger mesh (10M polygons) into Unity and it loaded alright. Just… It was broken to many many 65500 tri meshes. Not so sweet.

Back to UE4:

Do I need to lower the polycount and use instead tessellation displacement? Would it really work as well (framerate wise and visually)?
What is the polycount per mesh limit that makes UE4 so slow on loading assets (OBJ by the way, I tried FBX too)?
Is it realistic to use 8k textures in UE4? Anyone tried it?

About the project:

  • No, it’s not a game, it’s for highpoly model visualisation. So no need for optimization (actually there is a need for displaying the real model as close as possible to its original shape).
  • The mesh is to be static only. That’s why I wish I could use the original model (which have been severely decimated already to about 1M tri)
  • There will be very complex pixel shaders in place, but this shouldn’t be a problem since screen space related.