yeah. they are wildly different approaches to rendering, with the realtime stuff taking shortcuts in the name of performance, whereas the non-realtime stuff is

yeah. they are wildly different approaches to rendering, with the realtime stuff taking shortcuts in the name of performance, whereas the non-realtime stuff isn't making the same choices. accuracy rules with path tracers like Cycles. realtime 3D engines have gotten extremely good at approximation, though, and they get better all the time. around the time they perfect it, hardware will be able to do pathtracing in real time, meaning the shortcut path and the long path to the goal of photorealism were about the same length, just through wildly different terrain.