How come the Blender 2.83 Splash Screen by Ian Hubert takes so much less time to render than my Doughnut tutorial?

Question

I'm completely new to blender and going through the Doughnut tutorial at the moment. I'm working on an old laptop (GTX 850M, i5-4210U, 8GB RAM) and the doughnut and cup together take about 10 mins to render. So just for the fun of it I decided to download the Blender 2.83 Splash Screen by Ian Hubert and render it on my machine, expecting it to render for something like a day. :P

But to my surprise, it took only 47 secs to render!

I realize that the splash screen is using Eevee and the doughnut tutorial uses Cycles but my mind was still completely blown by the time difference.

So my questions are:-

1. What are the most important factors contributing to the less time taken by the Splash screen? Or should we just chalk it up to Ian being an actual Blender god?!

2. More importantly as a beginner, should I spend more time and effort learning to use the Eevee renderer seeing that it takes much less time? Or is it that the more experienced you become on Blender the difference between the two render engines becomes less pronounced and you can master both of them?

Answer 1

While Cycles is a "path tracer", Eevee is rasterizer.

"Unlike Cycles, Eevee is not a raytrace render engine. Instead of computing each ray of light, Eevee uses a process called rasterization. Rasterization estimates the way light interacts with objects and materials using numerous algorithms. While Eevee is designed to use PBR principles, it is not perfect and Cycles will always provide more physically accurate renders. Because Eevee uses rasterization it has a large set of limitations." https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/introduction.html

for example almost all game engines are Rasterizer. That way we can "fake" most stuff to look like the real deal.

And you are in luck. Eevee and Cycles are very close togther in node setup so your work is have been cut in half already. But what you do need to learn is the Eevee limitations. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/limitations.html