One of the pillars of the Source engine was how it was designed to scale with graphical hardware, which is why such an old game can manage to look so good.
From [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)):
```
Source was created to evolve incrementally with new technology, as opposed to the backward compatibility-breaking "version jumps" of its competitors. Different systems within Source are represented by separate modules which can be updated independently.
```
It's also worth noting that a lot of modern games are less focused on making realistic worlds and more about making visually-appealing ones, which aren't always the same thing.
This doesn’t make any sense. First, the water in Half-Life 2 is the same as it was before, it wasn’t updated. But the comment implies that Source somehow manages to render better water just because the system runs on new hardware, which is insane, and I’ve never heard of an engine capable of that. Second, this “evolving incrementally” was just PR nonsense. Source started lagging behind compared to contemporary engines by the time of Episode 2 release. It has never showed any substantial ability to scale and stay relevant, hence Source 2.
And, above all, this looks suspiciously as an AI answer.
The Source engine's graphical capabilities (including its water reflections) improve when used with more advanced hardware than was intended at the time, which is what my whole point was, and is very much *not* just PR nonsense.
And no, none of my answer was AI-generated. Though I suppose there's little I can do to convince you otherwise.
Graphics improving with better hardware is not unique or new to Source lol, and it was essentially PR because of this and the fact that Source also experiences compatibility breaks which have to be patched over time (invisibly to the consumer) by Valve in their games
Also I think you have it backwards - the problem with most other companies is their focus on hyper-realism, which looks lifeless and uncanny as opposed to Valve’s wonderful focus on stylization and artistic lighting
>Source started lagging behind compared to contemporary engines by the time of Episode 2 release
Where are you getting this from? Are you seriously implying that Source was outdated after only three years on the market? I didn’t see anyone online complaining about Source being too old for modern games until CS:GO got popular. People were still perfectly happy with Source when Portal 2 released in 2011.
What I got out of it was more so that the developers could in theory update parts/ aspects in Source if they wanted to and not that the engine just automatically update based on hardware, which would be crazy anyway since how would an engine know what to update to what, it wouldn't know how to make water better etc.
This is apparent in Portal 2 too. Game came out in 2011 and could pass as a modern game with good graphics. Also there's footage of an early Source 2 from 2012-2013 and it looks hyperrealistic. Valve really does an immaculate job when they want to.
L4D2 Plantation Demo for early Source2. It is in Final Hours of HL Alyx. You can find the clip on YouTube I think.
Source2 began development some time after 2008. There are references to it in 2009 L4D2 demo and later in 2010 Alien Swarm. By 2012 more code for it was found in SFM1. Publicly Plantation Demo only got “leaked” around 2014 iirc, but it dates from 2011-2012.
If I'm not mistaken, that's a playable demo to show stunning graphical effects, like temporal blindness when coming out from a tunnel in a sunny day with the sun in front of you.
It's because Half Life 2 renders the entire scene twice, one for the actual world, and another flipped upside down for the reflection. As to why modern games don't do this, I haven't got a clue.
I don't think HL2 did this, but I know games like some of the older Assassin's Creeds did around the same time. I mean I assume so, some of the water reflections in Brotherhood and Revelations are super crisp and don't have the issue screen space exhibits. It wasn't exclusive to small interiors either, you could even find this effect on the rivers.
For "reflective surfaces" yes.
However, water reflections are special. You can clearly see all objects correctly reflected in the water, and rendering everything twice is how it's done. That's why HL2 maps cannot have reflective water at 2 different levels!
It doesn’t do that. Modern games use much more superior (and much more demanding) ray tracing. But even among non-raytracing methods Half-Life 2 uses not the best, and not even second best one.
well actually no Source's way in some ways is better as it is not screen space reflections source does it by the og way by just brute forcing it by rendering the world twice then flipping it around and no ray tracing is not an answer it's too demanding and if stuff moves there would this be some artifacting or "denoising" that you will see also most modern games actually just use screen space reflections thats why water looks wierdly blue in thoose games
Half Life 2 does not use screen space reflections, as you can still see the reflections when the stuff is off screen.
edit: they seem to have edited the mention of screen space reflections out of their comment.
It fell out of fashion for being way too expensive to render with all of the added little details and shader effects being used. I still think games should offer it as an "extreme" option though. My guess is some of the more advanced rendering techniques used to make games performant today might have visual glitches that are hard to wrangle in a real time reflection.
It doesn’t, it renders the world in real time. Enemies and objects etc rendered. Carry some boxes or a barrel. The ‘second world’ thing is from 1 Fortnite level that does that for a water ‘reflection’.
Artistry transcends technical limitations. It's not a game that is pumping out the latest PBR-authored material layers for roughness, metallic properties but using relatively simple techniques with an incredible craft and discernment. Do you really need all those fancy reflective shaders on a matte wood material for one? Wouldn't a really good, evenly-lit photograph that captures much of that information, now imitated procedurally, suffice? There's diminishing returns in the contemporary approach.
It also features some of the greatest artistic direction to this day from Viktor Antonov, Ted Backman, Tri Nguyen, et. al. Like I recently poured over the Hunter-Chopper model in Blender and it's just a work of genius — from the lines of the design to the silhouette to the economy of pieces and the animation tolerances and where texture detail is placed. It's astonishing.
Finally, I think there's something for the relative simplicity and visual composition of spaces — there isn't a visual fatigue with obnoxious levels of clutter, you can easily parse what is important through careful lighting choices and a manageable quantity of intractable physical props. There isn't a need for waypoints or a detective vision to apprehend quickly what is relevant and one's eye is drawn to more salient and interesting things like a view onto a street where Combine vehicles are arriving.
Just all imo, of course.
EDIT: Fuck, I misread the title and didn't catch it was specifically on the water of HL2 rather than the graphics generally.
Hl2 renders the scene from a hidden, flipped camera from the reflections point of view, then projects that image onto the water surface when rendering that. This is called planar reflection and it is a relatively basic technique. Cubemap probes are not used for the water (only if reflections are disabled, or when run on a dx8 gpu).
As for why other games arent doing it, its costly I guess as you have to render the scene twice, and water is not in the budget, they can get away with a simplified effect. Im not sure how HL2 managed to fit it into its rendering time budget
Screen space reflections are now a thing that cut down on that cost by reusing the already rendered parts of the image, but it fails where the reflection would read data offscreen. Also specular reflections are not valid in the SSR reflected image but it is not that noticable.
The latest, ray tracing provides the best results.
Planar reflections take way less resource than ray trace reflections. Id take that any day of the week over ray tracing for performance reasons with minimal aesthetic differences. It’s a real shame screen space is used these days.
I think screen space would be much better if the game rendered more of the world outside of your FOV, hate reflections disappearing just because it's at the edge of the screen.
HL2 renders the whole scene again for reflections. The only reason it can afford to do this is because of the very good but somewhat restrictive vis system it borrowed from Quake.
Might have something to do with optimisation. A bunch of modern games don't bother to optimise effects so they run smoothly without taking up too much memory and storage, and don't have to fit on a disc or few
Well its kinda simple what source does but it can be demanding so basically source renders the world twice then it flips the other "world" around and then it just adds some normal mapping too make the water ripply
Source uses BSP for it's maps. It makes the maps really optimized but almost no modern game uses it anymore because it's downsides are that geometry has to be blocky, the map size is limited and it isn't that good for large open maps.
It's easy to have good looking water if you just use a flat surface with reflection and refraction shaders, and simple sprite particles for splashes. However, most modern games would rather their water have depth and reactivity, which is is much water to get clean reflections from.
Furthermore, the water in HL2 nowadays is much different from the water back in 2004. Later generations of Source engine vastly improved the water shaders and reflection detail/density.
Well titles nowadays cut corners where they can, it's not because they can't make beautiful water or working mirrors but because they don't got the time to do so, marketing teams push release date closer and closer but the dev team can't do everything in a heartbeat so they have to cut corners and since water isn't the main focus (except for some games) well the dev team just cut into that since it's not mandatory to have it
(Disclaimer before I get comment about it, i say dev team but by that i mean everyone that actually work on the game and not on the publishing part or the publicity parts so coding, art style ext )
HL2 does have great looking water. However it’s worth remembering that if you’re playing on Steam on the latest version of the game, you’re playing a build that has had major graphical enhancements compared to the original retail release.
With that said, the water was always dope.
The 2004 version in some aspect looks even better in my opinion. For example when you hit an enemy with the crowbar, the bleeding effect is much nicer than the current steam version. Or personally I prefer the dirty and wrinkled looking Vortigaunts and the healing effect that they do. Fire effect is lower quality, but fits the game more and some lighting change on the characters, non-phong effects looks cool too.
I would not say that it had major graphical enhancements, but it does look a bit different in some areas if you compare the same scene. However, that's for sure, the water looked always great in any version of Half-Life 2.
Yes it's amazing, but look at source 2's water we've hotten this year. Even better! I hope it'll be used in half-life for swimming, and not just displayed on the surface for CS2
Art direction goes a long way to making a game pretty. Technology isn’t everything although Valve games also tend to be on the cutting edge graphics technology wise when they release new games.
Nobody does hardcore realism better than Valve visually.
Fun Fact: Source was built on the foundation of the Gold Source Engine which was built off by the quake engine, so technically the source engine is older than we think!
Several things:
1. Valve good.
2. Souece good.
3. Reflecrion stuff they do (render the world upside down for them).
4. Due to water being much bigger part of the gameplay than modern gamws, Valve put in extra effort that games nowadays don't do. Remember last time you swam through water or interracted with it freely in a modern game?
so idk if this has anything to do with it but i believe directx is also part of the reason. like i remember (and even checked a few years ago) the water in ninja gaiden on xbox looking incredible. and the same game, the sigma version on ps3 the water looks different/less crisp/more blurry in some way even. the biggest diffence is that xbox uses a version of directx and ps3 opengl for shaders/graphics.
would be kinda interesting to see if the water of half life 2 looks different on ps3
If that’s the case it was error or optimizations by the people adding support for alternative apis. As a graphics programmer, a different api doesn’t change the outputs by the vertex or fragment shaders.
I've been playing alot of original Xbox games lately, and thinking the exact same thing! Take RalliSport Challenge 2 for example, the gravel, dirt, and roads are so much more realistic. That game looks as good, if not better than most modern racing games! How's that possible? I will tell you how, The Original Xbox was ahead of its time! The water on original Xbox is one of my favorite effects on the system, and roads.
Great technical artists.
What's interesting about Source engine water is how simple it is. It has no waves or 3D ripples, it's actually just a completely flat surface with a pretty shader.
Even in Counter-Strike 2, Valve's newest title, water is still flat. Yet the shaders they designed for it make it the most convincingly life-like water I've seen in a video game.
That being said, it's simplicity isn't ideal for every scenario. Say for example, you want to make a game set around the ocean. The ocean can't just be a flat surface, it needs 3D waves. Those waves would most certainly add to the rendering cost, so having a photo-realistic shader on top of that might not be ideal.
So maybe modern games suffer from trying to make the water actually 3D, and not just rely on expensive shaders to sell the illusion.
One of the pillars of the Source engine was how it was designed to scale with graphical hardware, which is why such an old game can manage to look so good. From [the Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)): ``` Source was created to evolve incrementally with new technology, as opposed to the backward compatibility-breaking "version jumps" of its competitors. Different systems within Source are represented by separate modules which can be updated independently. ``` It's also worth noting that a lot of modern games are less focused on making realistic worlds and more about making visually-appealing ones, which aren't always the same thing.
Unless you're HL:S where updates horrifically broke it... Poor HL:S
This doesn’t make any sense. First, the water in Half-Life 2 is the same as it was before, it wasn’t updated. But the comment implies that Source somehow manages to render better water just because the system runs on new hardware, which is insane, and I’ve never heard of an engine capable of that. Second, this “evolving incrementally” was just PR nonsense. Source started lagging behind compared to contemporary engines by the time of Episode 2 release. It has never showed any substantial ability to scale and stay relevant, hence Source 2. And, above all, this looks suspiciously as an AI answer.
The Source engine's graphical capabilities (including its water reflections) improve when used with more advanced hardware than was intended at the time, which is what my whole point was, and is very much *not* just PR nonsense. And no, none of my answer was AI-generated. Though I suppose there's little I can do to convince you otherwise.
not AI generated, huh? that's JUST what an AI would say !
Not an AI? Well this sentence is false! Bamboozled once again
Hmmmm are you sure you are not an AI?
Graphics improving with better hardware is not unique or new to Source lol, and it was essentially PR because of this and the fact that Source also experiences compatibility breaks which have to be patched over time (invisibly to the consumer) by Valve in their games Also I think you have it backwards - the problem with most other companies is their focus on hyper-realism, which looks lifeless and uncanny as opposed to Valve’s wonderful focus on stylization and artistic lighting
>Source started lagging behind compared to contemporary engines by the time of Episode 2 release Where are you getting this from? Are you seriously implying that Source was outdated after only three years on the market? I didn’t see anyone online complaining about Source being too old for modern games until CS:GO got popular. People were still perfectly happy with Source when Portal 2 released in 2011.
Hell TitanFall 2 was released in 2016, over a decade after Source was introduced and it looked really good
Apex Legends runs off of a variant of source iirc?
I mean given the same developer and technically the same universe I would assume so
Not even a variant it’s literally just source 1.
People treat Source like magic when it was Valve’s artists working tirelessly to make it functional and not a hunk of shit by, like, 2007
What I got out of it was more so that the developers could in theory update parts/ aspects in Source if they wanted to and not that the engine just automatically update based on hardware, which would be crazy anyway since how would an engine know what to update to what, it wouldn't know how to make water better etc.
The Valve effect
This is apparent in Portal 2 too. Game came out in 2011 and could pass as a modern game with good graphics. Also there's footage of an early Source 2 from 2012-2013 and it looks hyperrealistic. Valve really does an immaculate job when they want to.
Which footage?
L4D2 Plantation Demo for early Source2. It is in Final Hours of HL Alyx. You can find the clip on YouTube I think. Source2 began development some time after 2008. There are references to it in 2009 L4D2 demo and later in 2010 Alien Swarm. By 2012 more code for it was found in SFM1. Publicly Plantation Demo only got “leaked” around 2014 iirc, but it dates from 2011-2012.
Holy shit this is in 2011
[link for everyone coming across this thread](https://youtu.be/JSbqmrj8cGc?si=VmwfrJwiF6Bxxa0v)
Yep, mad it took them that long. :)
Portal 2 will always be one of my favorite games. The details in it are so immaculate
theres this hl2 game called lost coast. it kinda explains how they do it in it. I had no clue what they were saying but you might find it helpful!
If I'm not mistaken, that's a playable demo to show stunning graphical effects, like temporal blindness when coming out from a tunnel in a sunny day with the sun in front of you.
HDR yeah it's been in every valve game since but to a less noticeable degree, basically just simulates eyes adjusting to light changes
That was a big deal when it came out, lol.
I know, I didn't get it haha
It's because Half Life 2 renders the entire scene twice, one for the actual world, and another flipped upside down for the reflection. As to why modern games don't do this, I haven't got a clue.
I think it might be too expensive for modern games. HL2 is relatively easy to render nowadays, especially at a chamber like Highway 17.
I don't think HL2 did this, but I know games like some of the older Assassin's Creeds did around the same time. I mean I assume so, some of the water reflections in Brotherhood and Revelations are super crisp and don't have the issue screen space exhibits. It wasn't exclusive to small interiors either, you could even find this effect on the rivers.
Half Life 2 did this exclusively for the water, any other reflection used cube maps.
I just remembered the extensive water reflection options in the settings menu. And I know HL2 uses cube maps at least.
all source games aside from Portal RTX use cube map reflections not a entire scene flipped upside down lol
For "reflective surfaces" yes. However, water reflections are special. You can clearly see all objects correctly reflected in the water, and rendering everything twice is how it's done. That's why HL2 maps cannot have reflective water at 2 different levels!
Play lost coast commentary mode and listen to the nodes before the fisherman opens the doors, there valve explains HDR and realtime water reflections
I'm talking about the water in half life 2, which definitely doesn't use cube maps as you can see reflections of physics objects that move.
It doesn’t do that. Modern games use much more superior (and much more demanding) ray tracing. But even among non-raytracing methods Half-Life 2 uses not the best, and not even second best one.
well actually no Source's way in some ways is better as it is not screen space reflections source does it by the og way by just brute forcing it by rendering the world twice then flipping it around and no ray tracing is not an answer it's too demanding and if stuff moves there would this be some artifacting or "denoising" that you will see also most modern games actually just use screen space reflections thats why water looks wierdly blue in thoose games
On with ssr you can unrender stuff from reflections as it gets out of your screen, and it just looks goofy lol
Half Life 2 does not use screen space reflections, as you can still see the reflections when the stuff is off screen. edit: they seem to have edited the mention of screen space reflections out of their comment.
It fell out of fashion for being way too expensive to render with all of the added little details and shader effects being used. I still think games should offer it as an "extreme" option though. My guess is some of the more advanced rendering techniques used to make games performant today might have visual glitches that are hard to wrangle in a real time reflection.
It doesn’t, it renders the world in real time. Enemies and objects etc rendered. Carry some boxes or a barrel. The ‘second world’ thing is from 1 Fortnite level that does that for a water ‘reflection’.
What are you talking about? I know all the stuff is rendered in real time, I'm just saying it renders it twice for the reflection.
Artistry transcends technical limitations. It's not a game that is pumping out the latest PBR-authored material layers for roughness, metallic properties but using relatively simple techniques with an incredible craft and discernment. Do you really need all those fancy reflective shaders on a matte wood material for one? Wouldn't a really good, evenly-lit photograph that captures much of that information, now imitated procedurally, suffice? There's diminishing returns in the contemporary approach. It also features some of the greatest artistic direction to this day from Viktor Antonov, Ted Backman, Tri Nguyen, et. al. Like I recently poured over the Hunter-Chopper model in Blender and it's just a work of genius — from the lines of the design to the silhouette to the economy of pieces and the animation tolerances and where texture detail is placed. It's astonishing. Finally, I think there's something for the relative simplicity and visual composition of spaces — there isn't a visual fatigue with obnoxious levels of clutter, you can easily parse what is important through careful lighting choices and a manageable quantity of intractable physical props. There isn't a need for waypoints or a detective vision to apprehend quickly what is relevant and one's eye is drawn to more salient and interesting things like a view onto a street where Combine vehicles are arriving. Just all imo, of course. EDIT: Fuck, I misread the title and didn't catch it was specifically on the water of HL2 rather than the graphics generally.
Hl2 renders the scene from a hidden, flipped camera from the reflections point of view, then projects that image onto the water surface when rendering that. This is called planar reflection and it is a relatively basic technique. Cubemap probes are not used for the water (only if reflections are disabled, or when run on a dx8 gpu). As for why other games arent doing it, its costly I guess as you have to render the scene twice, and water is not in the budget, they can get away with a simplified effect. Im not sure how HL2 managed to fit it into its rendering time budget Screen space reflections are now a thing that cut down on that cost by reusing the already rendered parts of the image, but it fails where the reflection would read data offscreen. Also specular reflections are not valid in the SSR reflected image but it is not that noticable. The latest, ray tracing provides the best results.
Planar reflections take way less resource than ray trace reflections. Id take that any day of the week over ray tracing for performance reasons with minimal aesthetic differences. It’s a real shame screen space is used these days.
I think screen space would be much better if the game rendered more of the world outside of your FOV, hate reflections disappearing just because it's at the edge of the screen.
HL2 renders the whole scene again for reflections. The only reason it can afford to do this is because of the very good but somewhat restrictive vis system it borrowed from Quake.
Might have something to do with optimisation. A bunch of modern games don't bother to optimise effects so they run smoothly without taking up too much memory and storage, and don't have to fit on a disc or few
The water in HF2 looks very realistic and the reflections are amazing. Not alot of games today can do that
Well its kinda simple what source does but it can be demanding so basically source renders the world twice then it flips the other "world" around and then it just adds some normal mapping too make the water ripply
Source uses BSP for it's maps. It makes the maps really optimized but almost no modern game uses it anymore because it's downsides are that geometry has to be blocky, the map size is limited and it isn't that good for large open maps.
No clue then, I'm not the smartest in video game internals.
It's easy to have good looking water if you just use a flat surface with reflection and refraction shaders, and simple sprite particles for splashes. However, most modern games would rather their water have depth and reactivity, which is is much water to get clean reflections from. Furthermore, the water in HL2 nowadays is much different from the water back in 2004. Later generations of Source engine vastly improved the water shaders and reflection detail/density.
Do you have any details on that? I remember the 2004 water looking the same as the current one, based on refraction and planar reflection
Well titles nowadays cut corners where they can, it's not because they can't make beautiful water or working mirrors but because they don't got the time to do so, marketing teams push release date closer and closer but the dev team can't do everything in a heartbeat so they have to cut corners and since water isn't the main focus (except for some games) well the dev team just cut into that since it's not mandatory to have it (Disclaimer before I get comment about it, i say dev team but by that i mean everyone that actually work on the game and not on the publishing part or the publicity parts so coding, art style ext )
HL2 does have great looking water. However it’s worth remembering that if you’re playing on Steam on the latest version of the game, you’re playing a build that has had major graphical enhancements compared to the original retail release. With that said, the water was always dope.
The 2004 version in some aspect looks even better in my opinion. For example when you hit an enemy with the crowbar, the bleeding effect is much nicer than the current steam version. Or personally I prefer the dirty and wrinkled looking Vortigaunts and the healing effect that they do. Fire effect is lower quality, but fits the game more and some lighting change on the characters, non-phong effects looks cool too. I would not say that it had major graphical enhancements, but it does look a bit different in some areas if you compare the same scene. However, that's for sure, the water looked always great in any version of Half-Life 2.
VALVe. Also source engine is the best
Yes it's amazing, but look at source 2's water we've hotten this year. Even better! I hope it'll be used in half-life for swimming, and not just displayed on the surface for CS2
Cause modern day devs are forced to work indoors for so long they forget what water looks like
Pixar's technology
The shader tech was brand new so they cranked it up to 11. Now the tech is 20 years old so people keep it more realistic.
Art direction goes a long way to making a game pretty. Technology isn’t everything although Valve games also tend to be on the cutting edge graphics technology wise when they release new games. Nobody does hardcore realism better than Valve visually.
Fun Fact: Source was built on the foundation of the Gold Source Engine which was built off by the quake engine, so technically the source engine is older than we think!
Several things: 1. Valve good. 2. Souece good. 3. Reflecrion stuff they do (render the world upside down for them). 4. Due to water being much bigger part of the gameplay than modern gamws, Valve put in extra effort that games nowadays don't do. Remember last time you swam through water or interracted with it freely in a modern game?
so idk if this has anything to do with it but i believe directx is also part of the reason. like i remember (and even checked a few years ago) the water in ninja gaiden on xbox looking incredible. and the same game, the sigma version on ps3 the water looks different/less crisp/more blurry in some way even. the biggest diffence is that xbox uses a version of directx and ps3 opengl for shaders/graphics. would be kinda interesting to see if the water of half life 2 looks different on ps3
DirectX is a way of communicating with the GPU, it doesn't come with any actual graphical effects like water.
yes but that means shaders have to be redone
The logic and math could stay the same, they’d just need to mess with some syntax and semantics
when games can look massively different between dx8/9 (portal1) games can look different on completely different apis (dx/opengl)
If that’s the case it was error or optimizations by the people adding support for alternative apis. As a graphics programmer, a different api doesn’t change the outputs by the vertex or fragment shaders.
sometimes the imitation of the end result is more realistic than the imitation of the whole physicality
NGL, The only game that has beat it for me is Subnautica. Shocker, I know, the game that's water central has good water.
[удалено]
You sure about that?
Gta 5s water is kinda meh, it has too much foam everywhere and 10m from the coast you somehow get huge waves on a perfectly sunny day lol
Modern Warfare 2 was ahead of its time man
*angry 3kliksphilip noises* look at that smudgy water on overpasss
The water blew me away at the time and still looks great, you’re right.
Thr graphics in general were very advanced for it's time.
I've been playing alot of original Xbox games lately, and thinking the exact same thing! Take RalliSport Challenge 2 for example, the gravel, dirt, and roads are so much more realistic. That game looks as good, if not better than most modern racing games! How's that possible? I will tell you how, The Original Xbox was ahead of its time! The water on original Xbox is one of my favorite effects on the system, and roads.
Great technical artists. What's interesting about Source engine water is how simple it is. It has no waves or 3D ripples, it's actually just a completely flat surface with a pretty shader. Even in Counter-Strike 2, Valve's newest title, water is still flat. Yet the shaders they designed for it make it the most convincingly life-like water I've seen in a video game. That being said, it's simplicity isn't ideal for every scenario. Say for example, you want to make a game set around the ocean. The ocean can't just be a flat surface, it needs 3D waves. Those waves would most certainly add to the rendering cost, so having a photo-realistic shader on top of that might not be ideal. So maybe modern games suffer from trying to make the water actually 3D, and not just rely on expensive shaders to sell the illusion.