Bolt Graphics unveils Zeus GPU built on RISC-V and path tracing tech

One of the more unexpected talks at last week's Ubuntu Summit 25.10 in London was by Antonio Salvemini of Bolt Graphics, who introduced the company's forthcoming range of Zeus graphics accelerator hardware. These are very unlike any conventional GPUs – or indeed anything else. Youtube Video Zeus takes a different approach to …

[Irongut]

> Doing it in hardware at high performance is new, though.

> This vulture isn't a gamer, but 120 frames per second of MCPT rendering sounds like something the film industry would pay a lot for.

My 5070 Ti manages 120 fps of path tracing in Cyberpunk every night. Maybe this vulture should learn more about gaming if he's going to write articles about GPUs and path tracing?

[Liam Proven]

> My 5070 Ti manages 120 fps of path tracing in Cyberpunk every night.

I suggest following the links and reading the company's own info.

https://bolt.graphics/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Bolt-Zeus-Announcement-External.pdf

Bolt claims significantly greater performance -- around an order of magnitude more -- while using much less electrical power, than an nVidia RTX 5090.

That's a GPU that is some 5x the price of yours, and would seem to be considerably more powerful.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-5090-vs-Nvidia-RTX-5070/4180vs4182

[Jim84]

Plus I believe Nvidia is using "AI" to interpolate frames/pixels. It is upping the framerate to 120fps from 30fps by guessing what half to three quarters of the frames should look like, rather than actually calculating them fully. This has been divisive among gamers for a while now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like double-vision водка-infused ray-tracing to me ... where's ironeyeballs when you need it?! ;}

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww come on! At ½k (720p VGA) anything is possible. Just gotta водка-octuple-vision it up and voilà, Zeus-like 4K 120 fps path tracing, plus a massive hangover bonus.

[Anonymous Coward]

водка ?

Must have led a sheltered life; never encountered водка — Duck searched for it and got a couple of pages of dyslexic for my trouble. Not being up with Cyrillic couldn't work out the phonetics† but finally found that водка is how one spells vodka in dyslexic. Probably perfectly readable after half a bottle. Stick with the Polish product — at least their alphabet apart from the dodgy Ł, is reasonably sober.

_{† useful reference Cyrillic alphabets: common letters.}

[eAbyss]

"Bolt's Zeus hardware will use an entirely different model, and we found it refreshing that the company's How it works page doesn't mention the dreaded initialism "AI" once."

Honestly, it looks like AI will be the only thing this is good for. Why else would you have expandable memory?

[Teal Bee]

To hold large scenes in memory. GPU memory wasn't invented for AI, you know...

[GR8_APE_69]

Nothing but Hot Air

I've seen this company do nothing but talk and make wild performance claims about their "product" which still hasn't produced any working silicon, even at a prototyping level.

I understand they're trying to make some form of proof of concept by making analogous comparisons and demonstrations using FPGAs, but until they have some proprietary working silicon, I'm going to assume Bolt Graphics is bullshit.

I understand the need for some publicity to help secure funding, but Bolt Graphics's videos always feel suspiciously closer to consumer advertisements than technical business demonstrations, and I think it might be because we're getting bullshitted by Bolt Graphics.

I don't want to go as far as to call them charlatans, but you either have working silicon or you don't, and until Bolt Graphics does, I'm tired of hearing their outlandish claims.