News GPU startup's cherry-picked path tracing test shows 13x edge over Nvidia's RTX 5090 — Bolt Graphics' Zeus 4c impresses, but key performance questio...

[Admin]

Bolt Graphics claims its Zeus GPUs outperform Nvidia's RTX 5090 by up to 13x in internal ray-tracing tests, though real-world gains remain unknown.

GPU startup's cherry-picked path tracing test shows 13x edge over Nvidia's RTX 5090 — Bolt Graphics' Zeus 4c impresses, but key performance questio... : Read more

 

[hsv-compass]

power point engineering ...

 

[Notton]

What are these for? Rendering path traced CG and SFX for film?

 

[gunish_d]

Would you go ahead and test the card if you could?

 

[bit_user]

FWIW, I did some digging into what info I could find, back in the comment thread of the prior announcement. The later posts in this thread are the more informed takes:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...irst-gpu-coming-in-2026.3875286/post-23471706
​

Basically, they've got some RISC-V cores, with vector extensions, and some dedicated RT engines.

Their claims might have some legitimacy, but I think Anton's skepticism is well-placed. It's very hard for a chip startup to beat the established players, due to how fast the industry moves and how many more resources the big companies have to throw at the venture.

 

[hushnecampus]

I'm more interested in the graph showing the 5090 to be almost twice as good at ray tracing as the 4090. Is that true? Is that reflected in raytracing heavy games like Cyberpunk and Doom?

 

[bit_user]

I'm more interested in the graph showing the 5090 to be almost twice as good at ray tracing as the 4090. Is that true?

That's what they claimed, but I think they're talking about a very low-level metric.

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...t-the-upgrades-coming-with-rtx-50-series-gpus
​

Is that reflected in raytracing heavy games like Cyberpunk and Doom?

Not sure, but those games don't spend 100% of their time doing ray intersection tests, so you wouldn't necessarily see a straight doubling in RT performance.

Also, that rate of ray intersection tests presumes you're not bottlenecked on things like memory accesses. So, it might be impractical to hit the max theoretical rate, in actual practice (although it shouldn't be too rare to surpass the ADA rate in bursts, or else they would've have improved it).