NVidia GeForce 8800 GT

The arrival of the nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX was close to a monumental event in the history of 3D graphics. It was the first card to support DirectX 10 and its associated unified shader model, it greatly improved image quality compared to nVidia's previous generation of cards (finally catching up with ATI in this regard), and it blew every other card on the planet out the water in terms of performance.