Seems to be only related on linked nature of particles. This is caused by some conflicting optimization done for viewport, which does not do particles re-calculation if they do not depend on time (which is crucial for big layout scene grass fields) and particle render setting switch which was relying on fact that render pipeline will do particle update via time dependency. Now we extent an old workaround for invisible objects, which now also deals with particles in the same way as old dependency graph was dealing with this: tag object data for update if there is particle system. There shouldn't be any speed difference between old and new depsgraph, since tagging was already needed and was happening. In Blender 2.8 such things should be easier to deal with since the whole depsgraph is to be evaluated for render engine anyway.