Pictures taken with the Cool VL Viewer v1.32.2.45 from Paikea (159, 184, 22) after zooming on the East pile of the bridge.

Remarks:

• All pictures have been taken with the default WL/EE midday setting (so to keep things actually comparable), and with "Fix reflections blue hue" enabled in PBR mode (so to make for the excess of blue sky reflection in water, that the use of the PBR midday setting would allow to eliminate with its black "Ambient lighting" and grey "Blue horizon" colors).

• There is no equivalent to the "Terrain & trees" ALM/Forward EE rendering water reflections in PBR mode, thus the "missing" picture for PBR.

• In PBR mode, automatic probes coverage is set to "Full scene" since PBR water reflections depend on reflection probes: it takes over a full minute for all probes to get created, update and settle, meaning this is in no way adequate for activities where your avatar moves around (e.g. sailing, flying or driving along coasts).

• In both ALM and PBR modes, pictures have been taken with "All shadows" enabled: notice how PBR waters still lack shadows.

• Notice how the PBR reflections look "pixelated", degrading the water aspect: this is due to the lower resolution of reflection probes.

• Not related to water reflections, but look how bad the semi-transparent (diffuse and ALM material alike) textures or alpha-blend faces are rendered in PBR mode (problem with the gamma correction factor scale of the transparency channel)... This badly needs fixing as well, and no, not with a flag to set on old builds (see my comment, dated 2024-09-21 in this feedback article).

• Click on pictures to see the full size screenshot version.