Aerospace company Raytheon Technologies has changed its name to "RTX," the same name given to Nvidia's past several generations of GeForce graphics cards. The move is a way to distinguish the company's commercial aerospace dealings from its defense-based activities. But Nvidia got there first.

RTX in the PC gaming world has always been synonymous with Jensen Huang and his brand of ray-tracing related technology. In other words, it makes reflections look gorgeous and GPUs look hot.

RTX, on the other hand, deals in things like airplanes, advanced materials, and missiles; to put RTX's size in perspective, this is a company that provides products to the US Department of Defense and 90% of civilian space launches and currently "protects" about half the world's population.

Nvidia realizing this name change is like a kindergartner seeing the biggest kid on the playground rocking up in the same Fortnite t-shirt as him. It's a nightmare.

In other words, despite Nvidia's market cap of about $1 trillion, RTX's market cap is $149 billion, and in a fist fight, RTX, with its literal cannon, might have the upper hand.

It is interesting to note that Nvidia currently has a trademark dedicated to GeForce RTX, the status of which is currently "Opposition Pending." This means that the trademark application is under review by the Trademark Office and that one or more companies are challenging Nvidia's right to use it, but no ruling has yet been issued.

However, this will remain the case after 2020, and it cannot be confirmed whether Raytheon is involved.

By all appearances, Nvidia has had previous dealings with the former Raytheon Technologies, which used Nvidia GPUs in the defense industry; Nvidia also uses RTX in its enterprise Ada GPU and Quadro products, and Raytheon is well.

I would like to think that RTX has permission to use the Green Team acronym.

To be fair, trademark issues are unlikely to arise in this case. Generally speaking, this is because as long as the products in question are in sufficiently different industries, there is no risk of them being mistaken for each other. We don't know; it could happen that you order what you think is a GPU and it turns out to be a Battleship Helm motherboard.

However, both companies have a big focus on AI, and a large portion of the RTX site talks about machine learning; pitted against Nvidia's well-known AI obsession, the two companies might butt heads somewhere in this regard.