but you tell me, is there something i'm missing? Raytraced shader?
As I understand it, shaders are increasingly becoming like a general programming language. I don't know much about shader raytracing, but I do know it's possible and has been done (and applied in real-time in certain cases).
as for it looking better you can have the same size object with the same amount of points on it but the nurbs will look more detailed because theres more polys.
Nobody seems to get this, but: Representing a polygon mesh with nurbs can increase (not decrease) the polygon count only. It cannot increase the detail! At best, it will make curved surfaces smoother, but it will have absolutely no advantage for intricate highly detailed meshes like the dragon I posted above.
P.S. I'm not arguing against raytracing - clearly it can produce the more realistic results than rasterization (though with much less work for the computer rasterization can produce nearly identical results). But the idea that nurbs is somehow superior than polygons for anything but the simplest shapes is ridiculous.