Bolt Graphics’ Zeus GPUs have slowly but surely been generating hype ever since the startup first announced its RISC-V GPUs in March. With its 2026 hardware launch steadily approaching, Bolt made a surprise appearance at the Ubuntu Summit 25.10 this week to talk about the software stack enabling its over-the-top hardware performance claims of being 13 times faster than Nvidia’s RTX 5090.
Antonio Salvemini, Director of Graphics Engineering at Bolt Graphics, presented a talk entitled “Beyond the Silicon: Redefining GPU Innovation Through Software and Methodology” at the Summit. Salvemini talked extensively about Bolt Graphics’ primary focus on path tracing, a graphics technology used primarily in the animation and film VFX worlds.
Path tracing is a step beyond ray tracing, but both rendering technologies have been an integral part of the Hollywood VFX pipeline for years and have only entered the consumer and gamer conversations in the current decade. The Zeus line of GPUs is being advertised, especially at the Ubuntu Summit, to be a way for visual effects artists to render path-tracing visuals in real-time.
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“The problem with ray tracing is that each light wave only bounces one way,” said Salvemini in his talk. “In path tracing, they can bounce anywhere, and you randomly select just some of these paths to display.” Path tracing traces light beams in reverse order, from the digital camera back along its exact path, bouncing from object to object, until it returns to the light source it would radiate from, creating a hyper-realistic light simulation only within the bounds of what the “camera” can see, reducing graphical overhead greatly.
Salvemini highlighted the Zeus team’s use of Intel’s Open Image Denoise open-source library for denoising ray- and path-traced images and the MaterialX open standard for shaders and textures as key parts of the Zeus pipeline for achieving path-tracing performance that is 13 times faster than the RTX 5090, according to Bolt’s own internal benchmarks.
The Zeus GPUs are built with a multi-chiplet RISC-V design on the RVA23 profile, and will be some of the first consumer chips on the new profile. The RISC-V open standard ISA has been traditionally used for lower-lift hardware such as MCUs and microcontrollers, making Bolt Graphics some of the frontrunners in taking the ISA into the consumer and professional CPU/GPU realms.
The company’s choice to present at the Ubuntu Summit 25.10 was likely due to a goal to break into the Hollywood VFX and animation market. The Motion Picture Academy and Dreamworks have both hosted talks at Ubuntu Summits before, both discussing motion picture software. Bolt’s own promotional materials for the Zeus line have heavily pandered to animation giants like Disney and Lucasfilm in the past. And Bolt Graphics is certainly not targeting the saturated AI or gaming markets with the Zeus line, as not a single mention of the “AI” acronym can be found anywhere on the company’s website FAQ.
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Bolt Graphics’s Zeus line of GPUs has a chance to shift the future of computer graphics and RISC-V forever if it finds success; rapidly accelerating VFX pipelines and majorly heightening the profile of RISC-V would both be major wins attributable to the startup. For our original deep dive into the spec sheets of all four Zeus GPUs, check that out right here.
