reflection2.izz

 waterdropx2.izz

It seems that the Color choices for the Shapes actor changed between Isadora 2 and Isadora 3. I suspect this was due to increased support for alpha channels, but I can't be 100% sure at this time. In any case, changing the shape to have a White Line and Black background (and increasing the Displace amount) got the effect working again.

Then I made a new scene, and converted the User Actor to use the GPU as @dbini suggested !

Knowing that rendering a shape every scene has some overhead,  I decided to make one more version where the circle is only rendered once per frame (rather than 8 circles per frame) an use Video Delay actors to make multiple ripples.

In the end it seems that the overhead of the Video Delay actor is greater than that of the render time for Shapes. 

attached is the file I worked on

your file has a bunch of cpu-based Classic Shapes actors which are going to throttle your system. its worth taking time to replace them with the gpu version.

best

p.

reflection2.izz

I haven't seen it working in V2 so I am guessing a bit here.. but it appears to me that your ripples are not being compounder together before being sent to the Blur. Perhaps you need to mix the previous in with the current Water-circle to get the range of ripples. Also, the Displace amount is set to Zero.. increasing this will show some effect.. and much more if the first water circle is fed to it rather than the end of the chain.
Could you share a version of this file that works as expected in Isadora V2, so that I could compare the two?