Nvidia is well known around the world for creating video graphics cards, with the company holding an impressive 94% market share in the sector. The company even provides the custom graphics chip for the Nintendo Switch 2 console. From more budget-minded offerings to high-end graphics cards, Nvidia needs a way to highlight the highest-end cards in a line, and does so by using the Ti abbreviation, which stands for Titanium.
One thing that helps define all modern Nvidia graphics cards is what is known as the CUDA core. A CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is responsible for processing the data sent to and from the graphics card, with potentially thousands of CUDA cores being used by a given Nvidia GPU. The more CUDA cores a graphics card has, the more powerful it generally is.
On top of CUDA cores, Nvidia graphics cards rely on dedicated VRAM (Video Random Access Memory) that is designed to process the video data coming from your graphics card. A video card that features more VRAM will allow you to produce and display higher, more complex graphics on screen. Cards in a line with the most CUDA cores and oftentimes with the most built-in VRAM generally earn the coveted Ti branding, marking them as the most powerful in a series.
The Ti on Nvidia cards stands for Titanium
The Ti abbreviation means that you can expect to see a mid-step performance boost over its non-Ti variant of the same card, usually with more CUDA cores and sometimes increased VRAM. You can see this clearly when comparing two cards, such as the RTX 4060 versus the RTX 4060 Ti, with the Ti variant outperforming the base model.
You might then expect to see a Ti variant of a card released sometime after the core model, but this isn’t always the case. Nvidia has released a Ti variant prior to the release of a card’s base model. The RTX 3060 Ti is a good example, as it launched in December 2020 while the base model didn’t drop until the following month.
NVIDIA also features video cards with the “SUPER” label. These cards often depict what is known in the industry as a mid-cycle refresh. These SUPER cards offer various enhancements over base-level cards and are often sought out by gamers as they tend to be more affordable while still offering improved performance. But if you can’t afford a new Nvidia Ti-branded graphics card, the company also offers GeForce Now, a cloud gaming service that lets you play the latest games via the cloud.
