eli5 Why does a graphics card render game frames smoothly in realtime, yet it takes significantly longer to render a Blender animation?

Question

eli5 Why does a graphics card render game frames smoothly in realtime, yet it takes significantly longer to render a Blender animation?

In: Other

Answer 1

Rasterizing vs Path Tracing. In video games we use a number of techniques to fake the way things look. In a game, a tree rally isn’t made up of leaves and branches, it’s made up of flat planes and high resolution textures. But in a Path Tracing engine, such as used in Blender and other cinematic 3D modeling engines, we’re simulating how light interacts with each object in the scene based on its material properties way down to sub-pixel resolution. That takes millions of more calculations than what you will see even in the most sophisticated game engine.