NVIDIA is celebrating 20 years of the GeForce 8800 GTX, which hit store shelves on November 8, 2006, with a free tech demo on Steam. Called GeForce 8800 GTX – 20 Years of a Legend, it was created by Unreal Engine artist Dylan Browne, the developer of Through The Ages, with support from NVIDIA. The semi-interactive demo puts players in a 2006-era PC gaming room, where they can unbox the 8800 GTX, inspect it up close, and install it in an era-accurate PC tower, with GeForce easter eggs scattered around. The scene is rendered with path tracing, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, and RTX Mega Geometry. It is available now on Steam and is coming soon to GeForce NOW for Ultimate members.

Naturally, the 8800 GTX itself can’t run any of this, which is quite ironic, to say the least. Steam lists an RTX 4070 as the bare minimum and recommends an RTX 5080, alongside 32 GB of system RAM and 30 GB of storage. That RAM figure alone is over 40 times the 8800 GTX’s 768 MB of video memory. The recommended RTX 5080 is far from cheap right now either, with TechSpot’s October survey putting its lowest US price at around $2,200. So a demo built around the thrill of unboxing a new GPU in 2006 wants one of the priciest gaming cards of 2026 to look its best.

The original card was built on the G80 architecture with 128 unified stream processors, paired with 768 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit bus, and launched at $599. It brought DirectX 10 support and was the first CUDA-capable GPU. Back then, it powered games like Crysis, BioShock, and Company of Heroes. NVIDIA eventually moved the 8800 series off mainline driver support with the Release 340 branch.

https://www.techpowerup.com/354571/nvidia-marks-20-years-of-the-geforce-8800-gtx-with-a-free-path-traced-steam-demo?shem=aimgspe,i3ppal,