Bolt Graphics announces Zeus, a completely new GPU design for high performance workloads including rendering, HPC, and gaming. Zeus addresses performance, efficiency, and functionality limitations with legacy GPUs.

Zeus is orders of magnitude faster than any other GPU in key workloads. Users can gain 10x in rendering performance, 6x in FP64 HPC workload performance, and 300x in electromagnetic wave simulations. Users running these types of demanding workloads need access to large amounts of memory. Bolt brings expandable memory to GPUs, for the first time, which allows users to increase their memory up to 384 GB in a PCIe card, and up to 2.25 TB per Zeus in a 2U server. A rack of Zeus 2U servers can be configured with up to 180 TB of memory, 8x larger than legacy GPUs.Historically, increasing performance requires more energy usage. Zeus reverses this long-term trend by reducing energy consumption while increasing performance. Reducing the impact GPUs have on the environment is one of Bolt's core values as a new entrant in the GPU space.

"Zeus increases performance while simultaneously reducing power consumption," said Darwesh Singh, Founder and CEO of Bolt Graphics. "I'm proud of the Bolt team's dedicated effort to create a solution that addresses key customer pain points, enabling them to be more productive and bring their ideas to life."

Another first for GPUs is native integration of high-speed 400 GbE and 800 GbE Ethernet interfaces directly into the GPU eliminating the need for expensive, high latency, and power hungry network interface cards. Now users can directly connect Zeus GPUs to each other at massive scale without any of those downsides.

Zeus will be available in multiple form factors including PCIe cards, servers, and the cloud. Bolt plans on expanding Zeus into smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and cars over the coming years, providing a unified GPU architecture across various platforms.

Glowstick: Real Time Path Tracing
Along with Zeus, Bolt Graphics is announcing Glowstick, a real time path tracer for rendering customers. Path tracing simulates complex light interactions that happen in the real world, but are too computationally intensive for legacy GPUs to simulate in real time. Glowstick will revolutionize industries like film, architecture, product design, and game development by enabling real time path tracing so users can see their work immediately and collaborate with their customers or coworkers on the spot.

A single Zeus PCIe card enables path tracing in real time at 4K 120 FPS for workloads like games, architecture, and product design without upscaling or frame generation workarounds. An architect working with their client can show off their photorealistic design and make changes with their clients immediately - reducing the need for hours-long re-renders or crashes from memory constraints. Film customers working on massive worlds with the highest quality textures can achieve real time path tracing with only 28 Zeus GPUs instead of 280 of the highest performing legacy GPUs. Not only will Zeus users be able to build smaller data centers or render farms, but they will require drastically less power from the city.

Glowstick will be included with Zeus at no additional cost and supports industry standard OpenUSD, MaterialX, OSL, and Deadline for seamless integration across platforms and render scheduling. Glowstick will also have its own texture library starting with 5,000 textures, the largest of any GPU vendor library.

Apollo: Electromagnetic Wave Simulation
Various industries, including scientific research, part and product engineering, pharmaceuticals, defense, energy, aerospace, weather modelling, photonics and optics design depend on accurate physics simulations.

Physics simulations were historically performed on large CPU clusters, but various limitations with legacy GPUs hindered wider adoption outside of exotic, expensive datacenter-class GPGPUs.

Electromagnetic wave simulations are key to designing modern high-technology products, including radar sensors, silicon photonics chips, medical equipment, consumer electronics products, and lenses. Faster and bigger simulations enable faster time to market and better parts, products, and systems.

Zeus resets performance and scale expectations around highly accurate physics simulations with over 300x performance in electromagnetic wave simulation, key for designing consumer electronics, optical lenses and waveguides, CT and X-Ray scanners, stealth materials, and more.

Zeus does not compromise accuracy for performance, maintaining IEEE-754 FP64 accuracy.
Users can take advantage of Zeus's enormous 2.25 TB of memory capacity to run 40x larger simulations.

Early Access: Join the Party
Bolt Graphics will be doing live demos at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco from March 18 to March 21. Users can sign up for early access to Zeus, Glowstick, and Apollo on the Bolt Graphics website (www.bolt.graphics). Developer kits will be available later in 2025, with mass production beginning in late 2026.