Comment by Maxatar

For most real time systems, including many games, it doesn't matter if one is more efficient than another because what matters is the predictability that comes from always rendering a complete frame in 1/60th of a second.

In many cases checking if absolutely nothing changed in a system isn't trivial either. You either have very fine grained tracking which involves a great deal of complexity and increased memory cost, or very broad tracking which results in a lot of false positives.