Next-Gen water – Unreal Engine 5 plugin showcases next-level fluid physics

The industry spent a decade pouring resources into ray tracing, photogrammetry, and neural upscaling, yet water in most games remained a pretty animated texture.

You can stare at reflections in a puddle for hours, but the moment you walk through it, the illusion falls apart. There's a strange irony in this – characters have learned to sweat convincingly, but the ocean still moves like jello.

That makes a recent demo scene built on FluidNinja stand out even more. It's a plugin for Unreal Engine 5 created by Hungarian developer Andras Ketzer. The video shows water flooding sandy shallows, flowing around objects, and reacting to pretty much everything that touches it, all at a stable 60 FPS on a modest RTX 3050.

According to the creators, the scene at HD settings costs 0.8ms on the CPU and 2ms on the GPU, less than 20% of the frame budget on an RTX 3080, and it still runs on an old GTX 1070.

There's an important catch, though. Full simulation only works within a 5-10 meter radius around the camera, with regular water taking over beyond that. Layering the system on top of a complete game with all its models, lighting, and AI still comes at a steep performance cost.

The tool itself isn't new either. FluidNinja has been in development for several years and already shipped in a commercial title back in 2023. It works for more than just environmental water too – it can handle character effects, like abilities for a water-bending mage type character. Anyone curious can try it themselves; a demo version is available on itch.io, and it's free for hobbyist developers.

Plenty of people in the comments immediately brought up the Nvidia PhysX era, when Borderlands 2, Mafia II, and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag showed off fancy liquid effects while framerates tanked.

Those effects basically needed a dedicated accelerator card at the time, and studios eventually just moved on.

One developer who tried building a similar system with a different asset ran into a wall. Water gets simulated on the GPU, and feeding that data back to the CPU for gameplay logic – things like soil erosion or ground moisture for plant growth – turned out too expensive. That's often why flashy water ends up as pure decoration instead of something you can actually interact with.