Bad Water Effects

I finished The Witcher 2 recently. It is the most beautiful game I have ever played, even prettier than Crysis. Except I noticed this:

wavy edges in front of water

This was taken on a dock overlooking a river. Do you see the wavy edges there? I first noticed this effect in Far Cry back in 2004, and it had the same problem. That does not happen in reality. It is so obvious, and expecting that it would be fixed by now in 2011 shouldn't be too much to ask for.

This is a problem with the effect in general. The goal of making objects beneath the water look distorted is achieved, but it also tends to distort the edges of objects in front of and not in the water. I would imagine that deferred rendering would take care of this easily, as would the new voodoo contained in DirectX 10 or 11.

Another flaky effect is screen space ambient occlusion. It approximates why corners are usually darker, and why the pavement beneath and the undersides of cars are still darker even when it is overcast. If this effect is done right, it's beautiful and I don't really notice it. If it's done wrong, there's a big fat shadow in the middle of every character's face cast by their (big fat) nose.

I cannot verify if Witcher 2 uses DX 9 or 10/11. I am definitely seeing next-gen effects like godrays and beautiful lighting on stone and metal surfaces. I'm finding that I'm turning off effects, not because I have to, but rather because I hate them, like depth of field, bloom, and motion blur.

You can't complain about this anymore. It's perfect!

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

FarCry
For the sake of nostalgia, I decided to reinstall FarCry again, even though I have reviewed some bastardized (but fun) sequel and its sort of successor. This is a game that I have no doubt played for hundreds of hours, alongside SimCity 2000, StarCraft, and later, Oblivion. The game is from 2004, the great FPS year. As such, it predates PC DVD-only releases, so the game comes on 5 CDs instead. Holy crap! The game is giving me grief before I've started it.
Papers, Please
Papers, Please is a bureaucrat simulator where you man a border checkpoint in a fictional totalitarian country during the late cold war. Gameplay mostly involves examining people's passports and other entry documents and calling 'gotcha' on them. Otherwise, you let them through if you can't find anything or you're lazy.
World of Goo 2
World of Goo 2 is another sequel to a game that I don't think needed one. However, given the amount of time since the original, I'll let this one slide. I haven't played through the original for several years, so any references to it are from my own memory, and may not be accurate.
High On Life
It's been a while since I played a silly game, so here we go. Some time ago, I happened across a Humble Bundle that had High On Life. I remember hearing about this, so I got it. A friend of mine is into Rick and Morty, and this game was made in part by the guy behind that show.
Rage 2
Once upon a time, I played Rage. It was a competent FPS, but forgettable. So forgettable that I forgot that it had a sequel. Looking through my Epic Game Store collection, it escaped me that I acquired it at some point. It must have been a freebie once. Judging by the fact I hurried my way through it in 5 days and had fun, Rage 2 is not forgettable, and is, in fact, quite enjoyable.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
Phantom Liberty is the only DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, so I'll skip a lot of things that article covers. Phantom Liberty takes place in Dogtown, a section of Night City that's next to Pacifica. Like Pacifica, it was meant to be the rich part of town, but something went wrong, and it became a half-built slum. It's home to a gang named Barghest, named after mythical hell dogs, so they named their territory Dogtown. (To me, this is a Witcher reference.)