In Rails, the render action 
"Renders the content that will be returned to the browser as the
  response body."
It is possible to render an action, text, the contents of a file, and other things, including a partial view.
render :action => "Create"
render :file => "/path/to/file/foo.erb", :layout => true, :status => 404
render :partial =>...
Using the partial label explicitly, disambiguates the render action for Rails ActionController. 
As far as performance, I haven't done the test to confirm, but I think it's reasonable to expect it is more efficient to use render :partial for the above reasons.
When I'm looking for the nuts & bolts underlying Rails logic, this is an excellent detailed technical reference.