What is the most efficient way to render water?

Question

1. Would I create the water surface mesh in C++, and control the movement/animation in the CPU, and afterward apply any shaders (reflect/refraction/caustics/etc..).
2. Or should I only create the mesh in C++ and afterward control movement in the vertex shader?

It seems with the second approach, it would be more difficult to simulate more complex water models.

What is the most common approach in modern video games?

Answer 1

Depends on which level of detail you wanna achieve. Height Maps could be a solution, try to avoid as much work on the CPU as possible in every case.

You can combine also some techniques as tesselation. There are plenty sites on the web for inspiration, you know where to search :)

Answer 2

Simplest possible way is obviously the following:

1. create mesh with enough vertices that describes water surface
2. configure your shader to move the vertices in a circle