New Challenger To NVIDIA's RTX 5090: Zeus Graphics Card Promises 10x Power

Last week, startup Bolt Graphics unveiled Zeus, an entirely new graphics card tailored for high-performance workloads, including rendering and gaming. Zeus aims to overcome traditional GPUs' performance, efficiency, and functionality limitations.

Minimizing the environmental impact of GPUs is a key priority for Bolt, a newcomer to the GPU market. Historically, boosting performance has often meant higher energy consumption, however, Zeus aims to break this trend by enhancing performance while reducing energy usage. According to the company, Zeus boasts unique features such as expandable memory and built-in Ethernet interfaces, and it will be available in several form factors, including PCIe cards, servers, and cloud-based solutions. In the future, Bolt plans to expand Zeus into smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and cars, creating a unified GPU architecture across multiple platforms.

The official announcement makes no mention of AI. According to the slides published by ServeTheHome, Bolt compares its Zeus GPU to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, claiming it's 10 times faster. However, an analysis by Tom's Hardware highlights a key drawback: Zeus outperforms the RTX 5090 only in path tracing and FP64 compute workloads, as it lacks support for traditional rendering techniques, which reduces its potential to become one of the top graphics cards.

Bolt's Glowstick path tracing rendering engine could provide a promising in-house solution for real-time rendering, making it well-suited for professional visualization applications. Compared to existing solutions, Bolt claims up to 2.5x faster performance on single-chip variants, with even greater scaling potential when using multiple GPUs.

Since Zeus is based on RISC-V, it also has the potential to leverage existing open-source tools and libraries. Still, it remains unclear whether Zeus will support industry-standard frameworks like OpenCL, Vulkan, and CUDA translation layers, critical components for gaining traction in HPC workloads. As for availability, Bolt Graphics states that the first developer kits will be released in late 2025, with full production scheduled for late 2026.

Update: The Bolt Graphics team reached out to 80 Level to issue a correction.

"We wanted to clarify that raster functionality is indeed supported through TMU and ROP engines. We aren't disclosing design details or the performance of the raster pipeline inside Zeus yet. Our early benchmarks are competitive with NVIDIA's RTX 4090, but we have some work to do in further optimizations," Darwesh Singh, CEO of Bolt Graphics.

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