Nvidia is celebrating one of its most famous graphics cards with a free Steam demo about taking it out of the box. The catch, and the reason it is getting attention, is the hardware list: Steam gives an RTX 4070 as the minimum and an RTX 5080 as the recommended GPU.
*GeForce 8800 GTX - 20 Years of a Legend* came out on Steam on November 5. Nvidia says it was made by Dylan Browne, the developer of *Through The Ages*, with Nvidia's support, and describes it as a semi-interactive demo for GeForce RTX and RTX Spark systems. You unbox the card in an era-accurate 2006 PC gaming room, inspect it, install it in a PC tower, and look around for GeForce history references and easter eggs.
The nostalgia is running on very modern technology. Nvidia lists path tracing, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and RTX Mega Geometry. Steam's listing also asks for 32GB of RAM and 30GB of storage at both minimum and recommended settings. Nvidia's post says the demo needs Game Ready Driver 621.14 or newer, while the Steam page lists 621.12 or later. Nvidia also says the demo is coming soon to GeForce NOW for Ultimate members, which would be a way in for anyone without the hardware, though it gives no date.
Why this card gets a birthday
Nvidia's post explains the anniversary. The 8800 GTX went on sale on November 8, 2006, built on the G80 architecture with 128 unified stream processors and 768MB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit bus. It supported DirectX 10, and Nvidia calls it "the first CUDA-capable graphics card," which helped launch CUDA for non-graphics computing. The post ties the card to *Company of Heroes*, *BioShock* and *Crysis*, the last of which arrived in 2007, a year after the card. The post also recalls tech demos such as *Cascades* and *Froggy*, and asks readers to share their 8800 GTX memories on social media.
The reaction
TechRadar's Darren Allan reports that many players are unhappy, and calls the demo tone deaf for the current PC components market, even while calling it a fun idea and smartly implemented. The complaint is about timing and price. TechRadar says the RAM crisis has pushed the RTX 5080 to over double its MSRP in the US, with price inflation of over 50% in the UK. It puts the 8800 GTX's launch price at $599.
TechRadar quotes one Redditor, with the swearing removed: "A 5080 for an unboxing simulator. They are just laughing in our faces." A commenter on Nvidia's YouTube video called it "a slap in the face." TechRadar also notes that some Redditors simply reminisced about the 2006 card they owned, so the response is not all anger. These are individual comments picked out by one outlet rather than a measure of how players feel overall. On Steam itself, the page showed only seven user reviews when we checked, too few for a score.
Nothing in Nvidia's post addresses the requirements or GPU prices, and we found no response from the company to the criticism in the sources we read.
Mason's take: A demo built to show off path tracing was always going to need a serious GPU, so the spec sheet alone isn't a scandal. The problem is the timing. A $599 flagship is a risky thing to get nostalgic about while today's high-end cards are selling for so much more. A GeForce NOW version can't come soon enough if Nvidia wants more people to actually open the box.
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