EEVEE is Blender's real-time renderer that uses rasterization, trading physical accuracy for speed

EEVEE is Blender’s real-time render engine, focused on speed and interactivity while still rendering PBR (physically-based) materials. It works by rasterization, not path tracing: instead of computing each ray of light, rasterization determines what surface is visible from the camera and then estimates how light interacts with those surfaces using a set of algorithms. This is the key trade-off against Cycles (Blender’s path tracer): EEVEE is far faster and can run interactively in the 3D viewport, but Cycles will always be more physically accurate, so EEVEE has a set of limitations (e.g. approximated reflections, shadows). Because EEVEE materials use the same shader nodes as Cycles, scenes can be previewed in real time in EEVEE and finalised in Cycles. For live visuals, EEVEE’s real-time nature is what makes Blender viable as a performance render engine.

Examples

EEVEE renders animated scenes live in the 3D viewport, usable as a real-time visual source; switching the same scene to Cycles yields slower but more accurate reflections and global illumination.

Assessment

Explain the difference between rasterization and path tracing, and state one thing EEVEE gains and one thing it gives up compared with Cycles.