On November 8, 2006, NVIDIA officially launched the GeForce 8800 GTX, along with the slightly lower-spec GeForce 8800 GTS. The two cards were priced at $599 and $449 respectively, both featuring the G80 chip. For NVIDIA, the G80 was a groundbreaking GPU. In addition to being the first to use a unified shader architecture and fully support DirectX 10, it also served as the foundation for Tesla, one of its three major brands at the time. The first general-purpose computing product, the Tesla C870, was based on the G80, laying the groundwork for NVIDIA's future entry into the data center and supercomputing fields.
As the first graphics card to support CUDA, the GeForce 8800 GTX marked the beginning of a new era for NVIDIA. Although nearly a month remains until November 8, NVIDIA has already begun celebrating the 20th anniversary of the GeForce 8800 GTX launch at the GeForce Day 2026 event.
The GeForce 8800 GTX delivered powerful performance for many classic PC games, including Crysis, Company of Heroes, and BioShock. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the GeForce 8800 GTX launch, Jacob Freeman will join us to revisit the highlights of this iconic graphics card in the history of PC gaming.
The G80 chip in the GeForce 8800 GTX was manufactured using TSMC's 90nm process, integrating approximately 681 million transistors. It featured 128 universal stream processors (CUDA cores), with a core clock of 575MHz and a shader clock of 1.35GHz. It came equipped with 768MB of GDDR3 memory, a 384-bit memory interface, and a bandwidth of 86.4GB/s. The card required dual 6-pin external power connectors and had a maximum power consumption exceeding 140W.