For decades, water has been one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in video games. You've probably noticed that in the handful of surfing titles that were released so far.
Developers learned to create convincing mountains, forests, cities, and even human faces long before they mastered oceans.
The thing is, water refuses to stay still.
It reflects the sky, bends light, changes color with depth, carries floating objects, crashes into rocks, forms foam, breaks into spray, and reacts instantly when something enters it.
Every one of those behaviors follows the laws of physics.
A beautiful ocean is relatively easy to draw, but building one that behaves like the real sea is something else entirely.
Surfing games have always exposed that challenge better than any other genre. There's hardly any gamer who won't say waves are the worst part of these attempts to get surfers into console video games.
Surfers instinctively know when a wave looks wrong. They can spot an unnatural takeoff, a slow breaking lip, or a barrel that closes too neatly.
The ocean follows patterns, but it is never predictable.
Recreating that balance has challenged the gaming industry for more than 40 years.
Early surfing titles such as "Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer," "Sunny Garcia Surfing," "Transworld Surf," and "Surfing H3O" delivered enjoyable gameplay because they concentrated on the feeling of riding waves rather than reproducing every detail of coastal physics.
They were smart compromises for the hardware available at the time.
So, what could lie ahead? Could we still dream of playing the undisputed greatest surfing of all time?
The first digital oceans
If you've been around for, let's say, 50 years, you know that early video games did not simulate water at all.
Oceans and rivers were little more than animated textures that repeated endlessly across flat surfaces. They looked convincing from a distance, but they never responded to weather, coastlines, or players.
As graphics hardware improved during the late 1990s, developers began using mathematical waves instead of simple animations.
The most influential model became the Gerstner wave, first described by German mathematician Franz Gerstner in 1802.
Unlike ordinary sine waves, which simply move the surface up and down, Gerstner waves also move the water sideways.
That produces sharper crests and smoother troughs that resemble real ocean swells much more closely.
Each wave is controlled by a handful of values such as height, direction, wavelength, speed, and steepness.
By combining dozens of these waves, developers could build oceans that looked surprisingly natural while remaining fast enough to run in real time.
The technique became a favorite because it struck an excellent balance between realism and performance.
Even today, modern game engines such as Unreal Engine still use layered Gerstner waves in many water systems because they are stable, efficient, and easy for artists to control.
A mathematical breakthrough
As games grew larger, developers needed oceans that could stretch to the horizon without revealing repeating patterns.
A major breakthrough arrived in 2001, when visual effects researcher Jerry Tessendorf published a paper describing how Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) could generate realistic ocean surfaces.
Instead of adding individual waves one by one, FFT combines thousands of wave frequencies into a single evolving ocean.
Long swells, short chop, and tiny ripples naturally interfere with one another, producing a surface that behaves much more like the open sea.
The heavy mathematics happens almost entirely on the graphics processor, or GPU.
Modern GPUs contain thousands of computing cores capable of performing these calculations simultaneously, allowing complex oceans to update dozens of times every second.
FFT has become the foundation of many AAA ocean systems because it produces realistic deep water while remaining efficient enough for modern consoles and PCs.
Why surfers are the toughest audience
An open ocean is only half the story. The most difficult part begins when a swell approaches land.
As waves move into shallow water, they slow down, grow taller, bend around reefs and headlands, steepen, pitch forward, collapse, generate whitewater, and interact with returning currents.
Sandbars constantly reshape these processes, which is why the same break can produce different waves from one season to the next.
This is where many video game oceans still fall short of a real-life feel.
Standard FFT models reproduce deep water extremely well, but they are not designed to handle every detail of coastal wave transformation.
Developers therefore combine FFT with other simulation methods that calculate shallow water flow, seabed interaction, foam, turbulence, and breaking waves.
Surfing games demand all of these systems at the same time.
A sailing game can hide imperfections because players usually view the ocean from above. A surfing game places the player on - or inside - the wave itself.
Every section, every barrel, every closeout, and every line along the face becomes part of the experience.
That is why surfing remains one of the hardest sports to recreate convincingly in interactive entertainment.
Why fake water still dominates
Even today's most impressive oceans rely on carefully designed shortcuts.
Game developers often describe them as "cheats," although they are really clever approximations.
Instead of simulating every drop of water, different systems handle different jobs.
One generates the main swell, another creates small ripples, and others produce foam, spray, reflections, underwater light, boat wakes, and buoyancy.
Only the areas closest to the player receive the highest level of detail. Waves near the horizon use fewer calculations because the difference is almost impossible to notice.
It's an adaptive approach, known as level of detail (LOD), that allows enormous oceans to run smoothly without overwhelming the hardware.
Without these shortcuts, today's fastest consoles would struggle to maintain playable frame rates.
Flow maps are no longer enough
For years, rivers and shorelines relied heavily on flow maps (see picture below).
Artists painted textures that told the water which direction to move. The illusion worked well for streams and waterfalls, but the water itself never truly responded to the environment.
A rock could not naturally redirect the current, boats produced only simple wake effects, and two rivers rarely mixed in physically accurate ways.
Modern players expect much more.
Recent water systems increasingly combine flow maps with real-time simulations that react to terrain, weather, and gameplay.
Flow maps remain useful for guiding rivers and waterfalls, but they are no longer enough for games that aim to recreate the complexity of nature.
The challenge of light
Even perfect physics cannot save poor lighting.
Water changes appearance depending on the viewing angle, the weather, the time of day, and its depth.
It reflects the sky while allowing the eye to see below the surface.
Sunlight bends as it enters the water, creating refraction. Tiny suspended particles scatter light, giving tropical lagoons their turquoise color and deep oceans their dark blue appearance.
Foam introduces another layer of complexity.
Real foam is not simply white paint floating on the surface. It forms where turbulence traps countless air bubbles inside the water.
It stretches, drifts with currents, breaks apart, and disappears before reforming somewhere else.
Modern graphics engines increasingly generate foam from wave steepness, shoreline interaction, and turbulence rather than relying on fixed textures.
The result feels far more alive.
Why movies still have better water
If video games can render realistic oceans, why do movie waves often look even better?
The answer is time.
Visual effects studios usually rely on FLIP, short for Fluid Implicit Particle simulation.
Instead of calculating only the surface, FLIP models millions of individual particles representing the entire body of water.
It's a system that allows waves to explode into spray, collide naturally, and generate extremely realistic turbulence.
The downside is speed.
A single frame may require minutes or even hours to calculate before it is rendered.
Films can afford that because every shot is produced long before audiences see it - video games cannot.
Every frame must react instantly to player input, often within less than 17 milliseconds.
Developers therefore reserve expensive particle simulations for localized effects such as splashes, waterfalls, or breaking surf while the larger ocean relies on faster mathematical models.
The new generation of oceans
Some of today's best water systems combine several techniques instead of relying on a single solution.
"Sea of Thieves" remains one of the industry's most admired examples.
Its rolling ocean uses spectral wave simulation together with realistic buoyancy, allowing ships to respond naturally to changing seas while remaining synchronized across online multiplayer sessions.
"Red Dead Redemption 2" impresses with detailed rivers, lakes, and shoreline interactions that respond convincingly to weather and player movement.
"Grand Theft Auto V" still delivers remarkably believable open water more than a decade after its release. There are even mods for creating bigger rideable waves.
"Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora" showcases advanced tropical rivers and coastal environments with sophisticated lighting, surface, and underwater effects.
"Crimson Desert" has also attracted attention with demonstrations featuring highly detailed water interaction in river streams.
All these games, with their great water simulation work, illustrate an important point - there is no universal water engine.
Every studio blends different technologies to match its artistic goals, gameplay needs, and hardware budget, and still relies on programmers' creativity to make water look better and better.
Coming up
One thing's for sure: the search for the perfect digital wave continues at a good pace.
Researchers are combining FFT oceans with shallow water solvers, particle simulations, adaptive meshes, and increasingly powerful GPUs.
Experimental projects are also exploring machine learning techniques that could estimate small-scale details too expensive to calculate directly.
The destination is not simply prettier water. Games need more than that and, surfers in particular, are more and more demanding.
Developers want oceans that can be read like the real sea, and swells that wrap naturally around points.
The search for sandbars that reshape a break after a storm, and for whitewater that carries the same unpredictable energy surfers feel every time they paddle into the lineup continues.
Video games have come a long way since flat blue textures slid across television screens or in "California Games." Yet the ocean remains one of nature's greatest illusions.
The closer technology gets to capturing it, the more we appreciate just how extraordinary the real thing is.
And it is surely getting better year after year.
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