As Blender 2.80 development advances toward the first Release Candidate, Eevee becomes more stable and receives more features. With Blender Internal out of the picture and the promise of greatly improved speed, Eevee generates a lot of excitement – and a corresponding amount of questions. The most important two are, of course, “how fast is it?” and “how does the output quality compare to Cycles?”

We decided to run a few tests on our farm and see what the results will tell us. We picked three different scenes that have both Cycles and Eevee versions and rendered them on our servers. The resulted images are not identical, as lighting works differently in the two engines. They are close enough to be relevant for the purpose of this test, though, and they should give you a better insight into Eevee’s capabilities.