GPU firm Bolt Graphics becomes Blender’s latest Corporate Patron
Start-up GPU manufacturer Bolt Graphics has become the latest Corporate Patron of the Blender Development Fund, contributing €240,000/year towards development of Blender.
The news makes Bolt Graphics’ contribution to development of the open-source 3D software the largest of any GPU manufacturer – before it has even shipped a graphics card.
A startup GPU developer with ambitious projections, but unproven real-world performance
California-based startup Bolt Graphics made headlines in the tech press earlier this year when it announced its Zeus GPU platform.
It uses an architecture optimized for path tracing, and the firm claims that its GPUs have higher ray tracing performance than NVIDIA’s top-of-the-range gaming card, the GeForce RTX 5090.
The figures are currently based on internal simulations rather than actual hardware testing, and the Zeus architecture’s likely performance in other common graphics tasks is not clear.
Bolt Graphics plans four separate cards, with between 32GB and 256GB of on-board memory, targeting the gaming, computer graphics and high-performance computing markets.
Dev kits are now due to ship in 2026, with the cards themselves not expected to enter mass production until 2027.
Now contributing more to Blender development than AMD, Intel or NVIDIA
However, Bolt Graphics has already committed a chunk of its funding to Blender development, with its Corporate Patron status indicating a minimum contribution of €240,000/year.
That outstrips the established GPU manufacturers: both NVIDIA and AMD are currently Titanium-level patrons, which equates to €120,000/year, while Intel’s Platinum status equates to €60,000/year.
Bolt Graphics had already announced that Blender is one of the applications in which is is “building support for Zeus”, alongside 3ds Max, Houdini, Maya, Nuke, Unity and Unreal Engine.
In a post on LinkedIn, Bolt Graphics founder and CEO Darwesh Singh said that that the Bolt team “uses Blender every day to benchmark our technology and create art”.
Singh said that he “grew up using Blender myself when I had no money to give back” and that backing the Development Fund is a “dream come true” before concluding, “WE 💛 BLENDER!!!”.
Read the Blender Foundation’s announcement of Bolt Graphics’ Corporate Patron status
Visit the Blender Development Fund website
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