The GeForce 8 series is the eighth generation of Nvidia's GeForce line of graphics processing units. The third major GPU architecture developed by Nvidia, Tesla represents the company's first unified shader architecture.

Tesla is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2006, as the successor to Curie microarchitecture. It was named after the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. As Nvidia's first microarchitecture to implement unified shaders, it was used with GeForce 8 series, GeForce 9 series, GeForce 100 series, GeForce 200 series, and GeForce 300 series of GPUs, collectively manufactured in 90 nm, 80 nm, 65 nm, 55 nm, and 40 nm. It was also in the GeForce 405 and in the Quadro FX, Quadro x000, Quadro NVS series, and Nvidia Tesla computing modules.