Those shots look fantastic Chris.
Also I'd chip in my $0.02..
If you were writing this for a commercial application where everything has to be spot on to generate photo-realistic stuff, or even as an excersise for yourself, then perhaps you wouldn't take this approach of using "bad" techniques.
If it's me who's watching the demo though I would rather you cheated and used every dodge in the book to get the speed up and to add interesting effects.
Demo coding is partly about coding knowledge, partly about design and partly about cheating... Always has been and always will... No matter how much power our processors will give us.
Anyway I am lucky, I have PS3.0 and I want to see you make a demo for this.
I bought a new video card just because I couldn't run your stuff, but you know that already.