`docs/GRAPHICS.md` said we had refraction and foam but no mirror. That was
wrong. `waterQuality` 2 has carried a depth-marched screen-space
reflection of the scenery all along (`enhanced_water.wgsl`, "HIGH"), with
bisection refinement against the real scene depth rather than the fixed
probe its WarcraftXL source took. What was missing was the switch: the
registered default was Enhanced (sky only), and of the five lighting rungs
only Ultra reached High.
The line holding it back said exactly what it was waiting for —
"Mirror reflections stay opt-in until their cost is measured." So I
measured it, `WOW_FPS_PROBE=300`:
Classic Enhanced High
Lake Everstill 1.91 ms 1.84 ms 1.90 ms
open ocean 1.89 ms 1.88 ms 1.89 ms
Every tier is inside the run-to-run noise — Enhanced lands FASTER than
Classic on the lake, which is how you know you are reading noise rather
than a cost. What it buys is not noise: the far bank and the mountains
appear in the water, 18.5% of the lake frame and 35.1% of the ocean frame.
So High becomes the default and the High rung. That is a weld across four
places the tests hold together, and each one bit in turn and was fixed as
it asked: `REGISTERED`, `VideoConfig`'s literal, `WaterQuality::default`,
and the rung itself — the High rung IS the registered defaults, which
`the_high_preset_is_the_registered_defaults` states and enforces.
Low and Medium keep Enhanced deliberately, and that needed saying in the
one test that assumed every rung between Off and Ultra sits AT its
default: free on the machine it was measured on is an argument for the
default, not for the rung whose whole job is hardware that cannot afford
what this one can. `water_and_lava_observers_clamp_and_water_high_is_opt_in`
asserted the old decision in its name and its body, so it is renamed and
now pins the pairing the other way: High reflects, Medium does not.
The honest remaining gap is written into the doc rather than claimed as
done: SSR gives up when the ray leaves the screen and fades toward the top
edge, which is where a shallow-angle lake wants its far bank. A planar
pass would fill that — and it is the first item on the list that draws the
scene twice, so it costs main thread and gets priced against item 1's
view-distance table before anyone builds it.
Verified: ALL GATES GREEN (492 s); `benilla-app --lib` against the install
at the exact 269-failure baseline, set-identical by `comm`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SgstFWtn1RxEJ5kVrpgYwn
gromandClaude Opus 5
77fce9210e