well according to mr. graphics engineer
assurdum
over here quarter res CBR reflections look awful and therefor this can't be true.
I agree that this looks great and is enough... I really think he doesn't understand what is said in the video, or the article he linked.
I really thought I'm going crazy over here reading his responses... holy shit man.
but the reflections you think are blocky vs. the ones you think aren't don't really look different in the second pic you don't see any close up reflections. if you only compare the reflections near the front of the car, you don't really see a difference in quality to the first pic.
also what you see there is not the resolution of the reflections being blocky. RT reflections almost never actually reflect the higher quality versions of assets but usually render lower LOD models. because you have to remember that all the things rendered in the reflections need to be in RAM, actually reflecting high detail models would mean you can't cull anything off camera and the RAM and GPU usage would go throgh the roof.
this is the reason why in Watch Dogs for example, distant objects are not rendered and a basic reflection map is shown. Spider-Man on the other hand draws all the way to the horizon, but the models are extremely low detail
(I couldn't find a better image of Watch_Dogs for now)
Watch Dogs has higher quality models and textures in the reflections, while having a limited ray distance
while Spider-Man has very low quality models and textures in the reflections, while having endless ray distance
2 different approaches (I like the one in Spider-Man better since it suits an open world game better imo), but even in Watch Dogs the assets seen in reflections are not as high detail as assets outisde of them.
so in short, the leafs of that tree look blocky in the reflection not because of the render resolution of the reflections but because the tree is reflected as a lower detail model.
Ratchet & Clank tho is in fact extremely impressive, it has a pretty long (maybe infinite) ray distance and pretty high quality assets are reflected. it being not open world helps here a lot.