bagginsbill posted at 3:32AM Wed, 17 July 2019 - #4357179

Nodes are not dangerous. People are. So is a little knowledge.

You're both right. And both wrong. There is no single bottleneck that applies to all scenes equally. You can have scenes that spender 90% of their render time on shader evaluation, you can have scenes that are 90% ray intersections, you can have scenes that are 90% lighting. Even without going to pathological artificial examples, I've seen pretty much all of that in the wild.

If you want the true answer, Blender now has an integrated profiler for Cycles that will give you a report of how it spent its time: https://developer.blender.org/D3892