-USB will become obsolete(it already is), FBX has a less chance of that, it’s the main format from Autodesk which is the biggest 3D software company, so it’ll be the standard until something better comes along, it offers the most compatibility for geometry, materials, and animation in one format. It wouldn’t be difficult for a better format to be made, the issue is if the main programs would choose to support that format which is why FBX is probably going to remain for a long time. OBJ is another common format that is still used very often, UE4 supports that as well.
-Yes, it’s much easier to place your meshes in a program like 3ds Max or Maya than it is in UE4, so the deal is that if you were able easily match your object placement as it is in 3ds Max/Maya then it makes the process much easier. But again, that’s just for the meshes and object placement, there’s other things to keep in mind that you can only do in UE4 like configuring LOD’s and doing lighting and materials. With UE4 the viewport is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), but you still have to do some extra stuff, the biggest challenge is building lighting, which is where it renders the lighting and saves it to a lightmap texture, it’s a real pain to set up each mesh to work properly with lightmaps and once it’s set up you have to render the lighting which takes hours–for a large map you might have too much stuff to even do that because it has to load everything into memory, which that might require using a dynamic lighting setup instead of lightmaps which won’t look as good. That’s why in the future there will be a dynamic global illumination system that will provide much nicer looking dynamic lighting. UE4 originally had a dynamic GI system called SVOGI but it was removed before release because the performance was not good enough. With something like SVOGI you would get your lighting results instantly.
-Quadro is designed to improve performance in something like the Maya/3ds Max viewport, particularly for scenes that have lots of stuff. However, they aren’t very fast, and it has limited advantage outside of that use. You can get excellent performance with a Geforce card in Maya/3ds Max for a much lower cost, and for things like a video game the gaming cards perform much better than a Quadro. Also, there are GPU renderers like VrayRT, iRay, RedShift, etc. that render much faster with a gaming card than they do with something like a Quadro or a Tesla card. Simply put–Geforce is faster, better priced, and works better in most cases.
As for CPU, I would go for something with a higher clock speed, the issue with Xeons is that they’re built for multi-tasking and reliability, whereas something like the i7 processors are built for speed. The Xeon would be great for rendering or for baking the lightmaps in UE4 but not as good for actually running the game. The cost of Xeons is also not great, you pay much more for the performance than you do with an i7 processor, the deal though is that you could build a faster Xeon system than the fastest i7 system as long as you have enough money. Again, I would wait a bit because new processors and graphics cards are coming very soon.
-Right, in a game engine it’s all optimized to run well in real-time, not for graphical accuracy so there’s many areas that just aren’t as good.
-Rendering in 3ds Max/Maya is easier, since you don’t have to concern yourself with making things interactive or getting workarounds for things like lighting and other effects, but you do have to deal with render settings when you use Mental Ray or Vray or whatever renderer you’re using in 3ds Max/Maya, and of course it renders much slower–I consider it a victory if I can get a frame time to 10-15 minutes but in movies the frame times are much higher, like on the average computer most frame times would take a day or more which is why the visual effects studios have huge render farms.
-Games are still far away from matching what you can do rendering in 3ds Max/Maya. You can certainly get things looking great, and at some point it might even look photorealistic, but it won’t technically be as realistic and accurate though you might not care as long as it looks good to you. There might be a future where rendering in a video game isn’t any different from rendering in a 3D program, but that’s not happening any time soon.
-Right, if you want to use UE4 to just render stuff and don’t care about real-time performance then it becomes much easier, you can render things pretty nicely and there’s quality settings that you can turn up if you don’t care so much about it being real-time. There’s also stuff like Nvidia VXGI which is available for UE4 if you want to try a dynamic global illumination system that you could use and turn up the quality if you don’t are about framerate.