FBohler said:
My bet is the game ignores some areas of the screen when calculating the screen space reflections, for performance sake.
What we see in these bad reflections is likely to be the failure of the system that predicts which parts of the screen space will actually affect the resulting reflex.
In simpler words: the game thinks we won't be able to see the pixels behind palm trees.
That's not what's happening. I explained it above: the game
can't actually "see" any of the pixels "behind" the tree because SSR is calculated after the frame has already been rendered, so all it has access to is the 2D image of the rendered frame. The algorithm can't distinguish between something just hanging in front of the reflection path or something actively blocking it, so it just assumes it's being blocked (which creates fewer errors overall).
You can even see that some of the pixels have managed to ignore the palm tree creating that odd "ghosting" effect, because SSR doesn't sample all the pixels along the reflection path, only some of them, meaning that some of the reflections are calculated correctly because they haven't "noticed" the palm tree in their way.
SSR is fairly easy to understand and there is plenty of stuff written about it online that you can read if you're interested.