On November 8, 2006, NVIDIA made a significant splash in the tech world by officially rolling out two groundbreaking graphics cards: the high-end GeForce 8800 GTX and its slightly less powerful counterpart, the GeForce 8800 GTS. Priced at $599 and $449 respectively, both cards were powered by the innovative G80 chip. The G80 stands out as a revolutionary GPU from NVIDIA, being the first to embrace a unified rendering architecture and offer full compatibility with DirectX 10. Moreover, the Tesla C870, the inaugural product for general-purpose computing under one of NVIDIA's original three flagship brands—Tesla—was also built around the G80 chip. This move laid a solid foundation for NVIDIA's future ventures into the data center and supercomputing realms.
