I’m looking for suggestions for an SSR (Screen Space Reflections) effect that works with React Three Fiber. Earlier there used to be support through react-three-postprocessing, but that package doesn’t seem to exist in the newer ecosystem anymore, so I’m not using it now.
What are people currently using for SSR in R3F projects? Are there any maintained libraries or examples that integrate well with React Three Fiber, or is the recommended approach to implement it directly?
This is a good question, SSR in R3F has been a bit messy lately with the ecosystem shifting.
Right now there isn’t a single “go-to” solution that’s as clean and maintained as people would like. The old react-three-postprocessing path worked well, but yeah, it’s not really the standard anymore.
Most people are doing one of these:
Using the postprocessing library directly (the one by vanruesc) with R3F via custom setup. It still supports SSR, but you have to wire it yourself instead of relying on a wrapper. This is probably the closest thing to a production-ready path.
Switching to alternatives like screen-space reflections from drei or community ports, though these can be hit or miss depending on your setup and often lag behind core changes.
Avoiding SSR entirely and faking it with environment maps, cube cameras, or planar reflections. In a lot of cases this actually performs better and is more stable, especially on mobile.
Rolling a custom SSR pass. This gives full control, but it’s obviously more work and only really worth it if SSR is central to your visual goal.
The bigger thing to keep in mind is that SSR is expensive and fragile by nature. Even if you get it working, you’ll run into edge cases like missing data, noise, or temporal instability. That’s why a lot of production scenes lean on hybrid approaches instead of pure SSR.
If you’re targeting WebGPU, it might also be worth keeping an eye on newer pipelines since SSR implementations could improve there over time.
Would help to know your use case too, like whether you need accurate reflections for hero visuals or just subtle surface detail. That usually determines whether SSR is worth the effort or not.