Abstract: In order to compute the visible objects of reflection and refraction by water for a large-scale scene, a GPU-based preprocessing for potential visible set (PVS) is presented.A circle-surface water model and stencil buffer is selected to calculate the pixels on the rendered image from the reflection and refraction by water.The scene segmentation precision and the maximum error is adjusted according to the computation speed and the accuracy of the PVS, and the computational time of the PVS is shorter.The PVS algorithm is implemented in the water rendering of reflection and refraction and compared to previous algorithms.Experiment results on various scenes show that our algorithm can be used to provide a good solution for the calculation of the visible objects in general water simulation, to reduce the geometric data for the rendering, and enhance the rendering efficiency for the virtual navigation in a scene.