Can The Zeus GPU Really Outshine Nvidia's RTX 5090?

Graphics processor startup Bolt Graphics made an appearance at CES 2026 this week to discuss its long-awaited Zeus GPU, where it made grandiose claims of path tracing performance in excess of what an Nvidia RTX 5090 can manage, including a lower power draw, more memory, and a full PCIe 5 x16 interface, with support for DirectX 12 and Vulkan, as reported by TechPowerUp.

It all sounds a little too good to be true, but with the major graphics card makers focused almost entirely on making AI data center GPUs, we’ll take what we can get.

The Bolt Graphics Zeus is said to be a new GPU design that uses a single instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture controlled by a RISC-V command processor. It’s built on a PCIe 5 x16 interface, and uses LPDDR5X for graphics memory, and extra DDR5 SODIMM slots that you can add to. That gives the card up to a 384GB capacity—many, many times the VRAM of even an RTX 5090 with its 32GB. It also comes with a 400 or 800Gbps network interface for enterprise use, and the ability to cluster cards together for combined workloads.

That all sounds more like a GPU designed for the data center than one for gaming, but Bolt is pitching this thing as a GPU for gaming, enterprise, HPCs, rendering, and more. It claims that the card fully supports both Vulkan and DirectX12 APIs, and has support for the Unreal Engine and Unity specifically, with optimizations to advance path traced lighting. Bolt claims the Zeus is 2.5 times as fast as the RTX 5090 in that respect.

I’ll believe that when I see it. And by it, I mean the graphics card itself. While I love the idea of a new startup shaking up the GPU space—perhaps in the manner that we all hoped Intel would do with its Arc GPUs—Bolt will need to show off real hardware running real benchmarks and games if we want to believe it’s real. It’s been talking up Zeus for almost a year and has yet to provide a single public demo.

The updated numbers are good. It’s great that Bolt is still a thing and is working on a product, and the performance claims are so big you kind of want to believe them. But unless there’s a real product attached, they’re just claims.

Recommended by Our Editors

(Credit: Bolt Graphics)

In a roadmap published as part of a 48-page March 2025 announcement document (available here via the Wayback Machine), Bolt tipped early access to developer kits in Q4 2025, early server access in Q3 2026, and mass production by Q4 2026.

The ASIC-like approach to certain tasks has some potential, but I can see this as more likely a startup that AMD, Intel, or Nvidia scoop up to fold their ideas into future GPUs more than I can imagine a real third (or fourth) player in the consumer GPU space any time soon.