Startup Bolt Graphics promises 5x performance over Nvidia’s best GPU

It takes a brave company to go up against Nvidia in any market, let alone graphics performance. Intel tried and failed repeatedly, and AMD is barely hanging on. But Bolt Graphics thinks it has something in its Zeus GPU. Founded in 2020, Bolt Graphics’ Zeus GPU has just taped out – meaning design and development are done and it’s on to manufacturing — on TSMC’s 12nm process and is targeting a 2027 release. The company claims 5x faster path tracing than Nvidia RTX 5090 at a 250W power draw, compared to the 5090’s 575W draw. It has previously claimed10x rendering gains vs the 5090. Zeus isn’t just for graphics and gaming, however. Bolt is targeting HPC as well. It says its HPC accelerator version of Zeus can reach up to 20 TFLOPs of FP64 performance, well above the 1.423 TFLOPs of the Nvidia RTX6000 Ada Lovelace card at FP64. Bolt also claims Zeus performs electromagnetic wave simulations 300x faster than Nvidia’s B200. Zeus also features two features unique to GPU cards. First, it offers two SO-DIMM memory (the same kind used in laptops) slots on the card in addition to the LPDDR memory for a whopping 384GB of memory. Second, it has native 400GbE and 800GbE Ethernet support for direct, large-scale GPU interconnects. Going up against Nvidia and AMD may seem like a hopeless effort, but Jon Peddie, president of graphics consultancy Jon Peddie Research, likes their chances. “They are taking a dedicated approach, with a new and novel architecture,” he said. “Brand wise, it’ll be uphill until they get discovered, but that’s the gamer market. They are also getting good reception in the studios and ad agencies, and complex engineering in RF radiation, acoustics, and other EM fields up to radiation.” Peddie says the desktop graphics (i.e. gaming) is their least interesting market because it is so narrowly focused. “They offer real-time, photorealistic and accurate frames all the time – no AI tricks – that’s critical in engineering and science, and the high-end studios demand it, too, to persevere their copyright art,” he said. The company expects Zeus to enter production in Q4 2027.