Comment by avenoir

I was looking at the animation referenced in the article of water flowing over a rocky terrain and couldn't help but notice almost life-like and pixel-perfect precision of collision detection between water particles and the rocky surface. Yet, in modern gaming, while it's improved a great deal, quite often you'll see surfaces "fusing" together before a collision is detected. I think there is a more technical term for this, but it's not coming to mind. Is this just a matter of usability vs performance?