When Bolt Graphics formally announced its Zeus GPU platform earlier this year, the company briefly stated its upcoming flagship graphics processor can be around 10 times faster than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 in ray tracing workloads. But the startup never previously demonstrated actual benchmark results. Recently, the company quietly added a graph showing the relative ray tracing performance of Zeus GPUs compared to existing graphics cards, which appears to be quite impressive. However, there are a number of things to note about these simulated test results.
The graph that Bolt Graphics shows is the ray-triangle intersection budget, which is measured in ray-triangles (tris) per pixel per frame. This expresses how much raw ray tracing work a GPU can do in terms of ray–triangle intersection tests for every pixel in a single rendered frame, while maintaining a 120 FPS framerate, at 3840x2160 resolution. This number is useful as a theoretical ceiling for geometry and lighting complexity a GPU can handle in ray- or path-traced rendering. And it's in line with Bolt's marketing message, that since modern GPUs do not have enough ray tracing and path tracing performance, game developers do not use these technologies extensively.
