It's the 8th generation of GPUs developed by nVIDIA Corporation and the first ones to support DirectX 10 (Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL 2.0). It's preceeded by the GeForce 7 Series supporting up to DirectX 9.0c (SM 3.0) and suceeded by the GeForce 9 Series, still supporting the DirectX 10 API, unlike its rival, ATI, which released their first DirectX 10.1 cards with the HD 3000 Series.