i'm not sure where to start here... actually this is exactly what everyone thought when this hardware was new 10 years ago... and even before that we were thin

i'm not sure where to start here... actually this is exactly what everyone thought when this hardware was new 10 years ago... and even before that we were thinking about it. look at rendering demos from that time that leveraged the shader - this was the dumbass obvious thing that almost everyone did. this is not physical simulation - not even close. the navier-stokes equations are still really quite difficult to do anything real-time with unless you make some serious compromises. i will conceded that this is very loosely based on physical reality. but actually, you can do a lot, /lot/ better with clever hacks. as an example of one of the much, much better solutions which approximate reality than this - the old school 2d 'water' effect created from feedback and a clever 3x3 convolution filter shaped as a ring with a hole in the middle, for instance is visually much more impressive and computationally simpler - and it actually is a solution to a discretised wave equation. render this old effect as greyscale into a buffer than use it as a height/displacement-map style texture - with this solution implementing real-time ripples and fluid like response to objects entering the liquid comes down to rendering the outline into that buffer and these kinds of waves simply fall out rather than requiring maintenance or trig calls...