GeForce 800M series

The GeForce 800 series name was originally planned to be used for both desktop and mobile chips based on the Maxwell microarchitecture (GM-codenamed chips), named after the Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, which was previously introduced into the GeForce 700 series in the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti, released on February 18, 2014.

[6] This enabled Maxwell GPUs to be more independent from the main CPU according to Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

[8] First generation Maxwell GM107/GM108 provides few consumer-facing additional features; Nvidia instead focused on power efficiency.

[5] Nvidia increased the amount of L2 cache on GM107 to 2 MB, up from 256 KB on GK107, reducing the memory bandwidth needed.

[5] Nvidia also changed the streaming multiprocessor design from that of Kepler (SMX), naming it SMM.

Dynamic Parallelism and HyperQ, two features in GK110/GK208 GPUs, are also supported across the entire Maxwell product line.

Nvidia announced that after Release 470 drivers, it would transition driver support for the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 operating systems to legacy status and continue to provide critical security updates for these operating systems through September 2024.