Give up guys. If they can't understand my last post, they will not understand why it doesn't matter that the Ati one looks better.
The reflections in the Nvidia demo are limited to the few colors used in its environment, there is a reason all the buildings are grey and few color on anything else.
Don't want to insult you, but this just shows your limited knowlegde. For the 2 billio0nth time, this is a tech demo. Ray-tracing in a glance does this: find a surface (polygon), calculate the amount of light reflected/refracted, extract* the color of that position in the poly, move on to the next surface.
*It doesn't matter if that texture is a beatiful high detailed one or a completely grey one. In both cases the operation "LOAD_TEX (x,y)" or whatever the name it has, DOES occur. The "performance hit" is the same in both cases. Understand this for once before continuing with the nonsense and the acusations FFS.
Another thing to consider BEFORE talking about the hardware used is that this demo was at 1920x1200 while the other one was on 720p. And forget about resolution scalability of raster renderers, ray-tracing is 100% dependant on resolution. You can't compare both demos because they are very different, and both are as impressive. In a manner, this one is even more impressive, as I remember reading that Ati couldn't achieve such high resolutions no matter how much hardware they used.
And finally, YES, Ati hardware NOW is a lot better suited for ray-tracing becuse it has tons of shaders and a tesselator. Yet it can't do ray-tracing on a level it would be useful for games. This is a ray-tracing demo, not a demo to see which hardware can run it. Whenever the renderer software is prepared, hardware capable of running it will be released. Or do you honestly believe Nvidia is stupid or that they can't put as many shaders as Ati on one chip? When ray-tracing is mature enough Ati, Intel and Nvidia will all have their capable hardware, don't worry.