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:-
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?!
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?