Ti or Ti?
It’s a question that’s plagued Nvidia fans for years, ever since the company started appending the “Ti” designation to its most powerful GPUs, like the RTX 3090 Ti that Nvidia just announced at CES 2022.
But how do you pronounce “Ti”? There are two camps: those who pronounce it “tie,” like the neck garment or the first syllable of “titanium,” while others fervently insist that it’s pronounced as initials: “tee-eye.” Not even Nvidia seems to know which is right, as the company’s CES presentation showed — different presenters switched back and forth between saying “tie” and “tee-eye” from one segment to the next.
Should “GeForce” be called “Gee-Eee Force”? Of course not. Do you say “Ertex” instead of RTX? Preposterous. But Nvidia has let the “tie” / “tee-eye” debate simmer unchecked, even though the branding dates as far back as the GeForce 2 Ti from 2001.
Here’s a YouTube supercut of Nvidia’s senior vice president Jeff Fisher pronouncing it “tie” many, many times during the RTX 3080 Ti launch last year:
And yet whenever founder and CEO Jensen Huang (Nvidia’s motorcycle jacket-wearing public face of the company) cooks up a new graphics card in his kitchen, he tends to say “tee-eye” instead.
When asked about the proper pronunciation, the company punted on the issue entirely, with Nvidia’s corporate communications director Hector Marinez telling The Verge that “there is no wrong way to pronounce Ti…. as long as you spell it correctly.”
Or, in other words, in Nvidia’s eyes… it’s a tie.