Nvidia is marking the 20th anniversary of the GeForce 8800 GTX, a flagship graphics card released on November 8, 2006. The card was the first to support the CUDA platform, which enabled GPU computing beyond standard graphics rendering and established a foundation for modern accelerated computing architectures.
The GeForce 8800 GTX featured the G80 chip based on the 90nm Tesla architecture, equipped with 128 cores. It operated at a frequency of 576MHz and included 768MB of GDDR3 memory with a 384-bit bus, providing a bandwidth of 86GB/s. The card had a power consumption of 155W and required two 6-pin power connectors.
At launch, the card was priced at $599 and supported DX10 and OpenGL 3.3 APIs. It was capable of running demanding games of that era, such as Crysis and BioShock. The hardware utilized a PCIe 1.0 x16 interface for connectivity.
To celebrate the anniversary, Nvidia released a demo game on Steam created by artist Dylan Browne. The experience allows users to simulate unboxing and installing the card in a virtual 2006-style gaming room. The demo showcases modern features including path tracing, DLSS 4.5 ray reconstruction, and RTX Mega Geometry.
