Bolt Graphics Promises a Super Fast and Efficient Zeus GPU — Can It Really Beat Nvidia?

Bolt Graphics is a new company that says its Zeus graphics cards are much faster and use less power than Nvidia's top of the line RTX 5090. While Nvidia and AMD have dominated the graphics card world, Bolt Graphics wants to shake things up with bold claims about performance and efficiency.

According to Bolt Graphics, its Zeus GPUs can perform path tracing up to two and a half times faster than the RTX 5090. In simple terms, path tracing is an advanced lighting technique in games that makes graphics look more realistic. Even more impressively, the company says its card uses only a fraction of the power. For example, one Zeus model is said to use just 120 watts compared to the RTX 5090's 575 watts.

The Zeus cards use a unique design. Instead of following Nvidia's or AMD's way of building graphics cards, Zeus mixes a single threaded CPU with a separate unit for vector calculations and a large on chip memory cache. The cards come with up to 256 gigabytes of LPDDR5X memory, similar to the RAM you find in handheld PCs, and you can add even more laptop style RAM to boost capacity. However, this type of memory is not as fast as what Nvidia and AMD use in their high end cards, which could limit performance for certain games.

In technical comparisons, the Zeus chips are impressive in some areas like path tracing but fall behind in others that are important for games, such as standard graphics processing power and memory speed. The company has shared only predicted numbers from simulations and design software, not results from real hardware tests. Because of this, it is not certain how the Zeus GPU will perform when actually playing games.

Bolt Graphics plans to share developer kits in late 2025 and hopes to start mass production a year later. They promise support for key gaming software like DirectX and Vulkan, but making drivers work smoothly is very challenging and can take years to perfect.

In summary, Zeus GPUs could be very good at special tasks like advanced lighting and scientific calculations, but they may not be the best choice for everyday gaming. Still, new competition is always exciting, and if Bolt Graphics can solve its technical challenges, it might help make gaming graphics cards better and more affordable for everyone in the future.

Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/can-a-graphics-card-be-2-5x-faster-than-an-rtx-5090-in-path-tracing-and-use-80-percent-less-power-bolt-graphics-claims-its-zeus-gpu-powered-does-just-that/