Bolt Graphics completes chip design for its Zeus GPU - claims 5x faster path tracing than RTX 5090 at 250W

Last year, Bolt Graphics announced its Zeus GPU, and while the brand was relatively unknown, its claim of up to 10x faster rendering than the RTX 5090 drew attention. Now it seems the company is pushing full force toward a 2027 release, with the chip successfully taped out at TSMC using a 12nm FFC process node, marking the end of design and start of manufacturing.

For those out of the loop, Zeus is a next-generation compute platform designed to reduce the total cost of compute by up to 17 times across high-performance computing, rendering, and resource-intensive applications. The goal is a product that doesn't cost too much, consume too much power, or take up too much rack space. Zeus also introduces two industry-first features for GPUs: expandable memory that scales VRAM up to 8x, and native 400GbE and 800GbE Ethernet support for direct, large-scale GPU interconnects.

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Coming back to the Zeus GPUs, Bolt Graphics plans to offer them in both PCIe card and 2U server configurations, with multiple variants. The single-chip model, codenamed Bolt Zeus 1c26, features a single-slot, full-length PCIe design with up to 20 TFLOPs of FP16 performance, paired with 32GB of LPDDR5X memory and 128MB of on-chip cache. It also delivers up to 77 gigarays of path-tracing performance on a 120W power budget.

The more powerful dual-chiplet variant scales things up significantly, offering up to 40 TFLOPs of FP16 performance, 64GB to 128GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a larger 256MB cache. Path tracing performance doubles to 154 gigarays, with total board power rising to 250W. Finally, the Bolt Zeus 2U Server takes things even further, with up to 2GB of on-chip cache, 9,216GB of memory at 5.8TB/s, 1TB of LPDDR5X memory, 32GB of DDR5 DIMMs, and 1,228 gigarays of path tracing capability.

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Bolt Graphics has also shared updated performance figures, now claiming a 5x increase in path-tracing performance compared to the RTX 5090. That is pretty impressive when you consider this is a 250W dual-chip Zeus configuration going up against a 575W RTX 5090. HPC numbers indicate up to a 6x uplift, while EM simulation performance shows a 300x increase, though that comparison pits a four-chip Zeus configuration against a single RTX 5090. The company expects Zeus to enter production in Q4 2027.