The giveaway is not in the detail of the object -- detail is easy to create in CGI -- the giveaway is in the shading. It's too flat. This is clearly a plane which has been raytraced, and raytracing doesn't capture all the subtleties of the natural world. Specifically, it only shows direct light rather than reflected light. In the real world, light would reflect inside the intake manifold to create a much fuzzier gradient between light and shadow. Light would bounce off the manifold onto the underside of the canard, and off of the missile attachments onto the underside of the wing, so that both the wing and the canard would have much more variation in their shading, as in the photograph.

A really good radiosity (as opposed to raytracing) rendering could probably fool me, but this isn't quite there. Still, it's a very cool image.

Cheers,

Nathan.