What is the Meaning of ‘Ti’ in an Nvidia GPU?

Nvidia is the biggest manufacturer of graphics processors these days, alongside AMD. Their GPUs follow a very traceable pattern of launch. Every even year, they launch a new GPU generation, and every odd year, followed by the year they launched new GPUs, sees a mid-cycle refresh. These refreshed GPUs have been called ‘Ti’ for quite some time. We also saw Nvidia use ‘Super’ for the RTX 20 series and the GTX 16 series of GPUs. These included RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 Super, and GTX 1650 Super, among several others.

However, they ditched the ‘Super’ refresh with the newer Ampere GPUs. Now, the mid-tier refresh GPUs are called ‘Ti’ again, much like what we saw up to the GTX 10 series. A few examples are the RTX 3060 Ti, the RTX 3070 Ti, and the RTX 3080 Ti. But, what does ‘Ti’ stand for?

‘Ti’: The Literal Meaning

‘Ti’, in the Nvidia GPU universe, stands for titanium, but literally. It does not mean the Ti improvements of the original GPUs come with more titanium. They can pack the same amount of titanium required to construct their non-Ti variants. However, studying trends, we have observed these Ti GPUs come with more CUDA mores, more VRAM at times, and more RT cores in the case of the recent RTX GPUs.

RTX 3080 Ti vs. RTX 3080

A prime example of all the improvements above can be the RTX 3080 Ti GPU. Let’s have a look at the RTX 3080 Ti and how much Nvidia improved it compared to the original RTX 3080 from 2020.

	Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080	Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
​GPU Name	GA102	GA102 (N/A)
​CUDA Cores	8,724	10,240 (+17.4%)
Tensor Cores	272	320 (+17.6%)
​RT Cores	​68	80 (+17.6%)
​Memory Size	10 GB	12 GB (+20%)
​Memory Type	GDDR6X	GDDR6X (N/A)
​Memory Interface Bandwidth	320 bit	384 bit (+20%)
​Core Clock	1440 MHz	1365 MHz (-5.2%)
​Boost Clock	1710 MHz	1665 MHz (-2.6%)

The improved RTX 3080 Ti fetches around 17-20% improved hardware as compared to its non-Ti sibling. In the real world, this translates to a significant gaming performance increase. Let’s delve into the improvements in 4K gaming at the highest settings down below.

Game Name	Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080	Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla	58 FPS	​64 FPS (+10.3%)
​Cyberpunk 2077	​37 FPS	​42 FPS (+13.5%)
​Hitman III	​81 FPS	​89 FPS (+9.9%)
​Forza Horizon 4	​128 FPS	​139 FPS (+8.6%)
​Horizon: Zero Dawn	​72 FPS	​81 FPS (+12.5%)
​Days Gone	​81 FPS	​88 FPS (+8.6%)
​Red Dead Redemption II	​67 FPS	​74 FPS (+10.4%)
​Microsoft Flight Simulator	37 FPS	​40 FPS (+8.1%)

We can see around 10% improvement in gaming performance in the RTX 3080 Ti compared to the older non-Ti variant. This is due to more CUDA cores, more Tensor cores, and extra RT cores. Also, increased memory on a slightly larger memory bandwidth helps with the enormous textures that today’s games come with.

The mid-cycle refreshes of graphics cards are a fairly decent move on Nvidia’s part. These refreshes push the maximum out of the architecture, the manufacturing nodes, and the overall design before the company settles in for newer silicon. Studying trends, we can see an improvement of almost 10-20% over the stock cards, which is astounding. This shows how much research and development can get out of the same silicon.