NVIDIA kicked off the 20th anniversary of the GeForce 8800 GTX early at GeForce Day 2026, launching a social media campaign centered around GeForce collector's cards. The graphics card was released and went on sale on November 8, 2006, nearly a month before the actual anniversary date.
The GeForce 8800 GTX had a suggested retail price of $599 at launch, while the concurrently released GeForce 8800 GTS was priced at $449. NVIDIA also released a retrospective video detailing the history surrounding the GeForce 8800 GTX.
The GeForce 8800 GTX featured the G80 GPU, making it NVIDIA's first DirectX 10-capable graphics card and a significant model for introducing CUDA hardware support to the GeForce lineup. It utilized a unified shader architecture with 128 stream processors, a GPU clock speed of 575MHz, 768MB of GDDR3 VRAM, and a 384-bit memory bus.
In addition to handling graphics tasks, unified compute units can also perform general-purpose computing. This makes the G80 and its CUDA hardware support another technical thread to explore when looking back at this graphics card.
The retrospective video also mentioned PC games from that era, such as World of Warcraft, Battlefield 2, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Crysis, however, wasn't released until November 2007, about a year after the GeForce 8800 GTX hit the market.