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ELI5: How do games render particle effects so much faster than programs like after effects?

I understand that while games have preset effects, programs needs to calculate every particle. However the games particle effects arent the same everytime which I guess means that each particle is also calculated. How is it that a game like overwatch can calculate tens of effects more than 60 times a second while the same computer takes a minute to render a simple particle effect?
gpt
Part of it is the hardware used. Every computer has two main pieces of hardware which calculate things, graphics (gpu) and central (cpu). Each are specialized in some kind of processing and have a performance advantage at it. This is like having both a sedan and a truck. While both can take you shopping, a sedan is easier to park and the truck can carry large objects better. Going to the mall may work better the sedan and going to a home improvement store may need the truck. 

How programs leverage those resources is up how they are written. More recently, programs do a better job using the GPU when available and can spread the load across both accordingly, but games surely do have on average a larger focus on the GPU than other programs. It just so happens that the GPU is generally much more efficient for particle physics. 

The other part is how the particles are created and calculated. Games cheat in a lot of places to make it fast, as a stuttering image is far mor noticeable and negatively impactful to the viewers experience than cutting corners in particle calculations and only having an ‘approximate’ version of what should happen. Given that after effects and the like don’t have this real time constraint, they can take their sweet time in getting everything just right. 

A really good example of where this makes a difference is in lighting. Games will do something like ‘hey here’s the sun, it’s bright, and these surfaces face the sun so they’ll be bright too’. This is most of the way there, as in an outdoor, daytime scene, the sun is the brightest object. What it misses is that all surfaces reflect light to some degree. Mirrors obviously reflect a lot, but every object you see does too. That’s why you can see it. Calculating how bright something should be based off of not only the sun’s direct light, but also the faint reflections of everything around it gets to be very complicated. If you want to get it really close to accurate, that computation takes a while. If you want it to be live, you may only get to 90% accurate. After effects will start from how accurate it needs to be and work backwards for how long it will take, where the game will effectively work the other direction and set the time you have and cut corners to get something in that time frame.