1) Heavily modded games is about the closest I can come to agreement. There is some evidence that modded games can exceed vRAM budgets but that has been done badly in most instances I've been presented with. All metrics I've seen so far do not measure vRAM usage, they measure vRAM allocated, which I've gone into at length what that is inaccurate and misleading. I have however seen someone explicitly stating they have used this metric, it's a post on the resetera forums about memory measurement, and they admitted they were running over 1000 mods. Modding is a reasonably niche thing to do even in PC gaming, and people who use that many mods as to exceed vRAM budgets are extremely rare. And the simple fact is these people are outliers and Nvidia aren't going to increase the cost of something like a 3080 by putting on 6Gb more vRAM to appease the few people running 1000+ mods.
2) Future advantage is speculative and based on what evidence we have right now next gen titles will be GPU bound before they become vRAM bound, and I've given evidence as to why i think that.
3) This is just wrong and based on your conspiracy like theories about Nvidia holding back on memory while pocketing the cash for themselves. In the actual real world if Nvidia added more GDDR6x chips to the 3070 and 3080 it would cost them more to build and hence they'd have to sell the card at a greater price. You'd pay more for your video card for memory that you cannot use.
No one has given an example of a next gen game that will benefit from having 16Gb over 10Gb, or if they have maybe you can point me to a source?[/QUOTE]
1. Plenty of people of exceeded VRAM with modding and that tanks performance, that's a fact. No they've give consumers the same VRAM as people paid $200 for in 2016, knowing that the majority of buyers will be mugs who can't see through the fact that it's a con, people like you.
2. It's not speculative it's already here and on the way.
3. Who else is pocketing the cash?
You can cling to 2016's VRAM all you like, that's up to you, if you're happy with it, what irks you so much that others don't see it that way? After all you're set for years to come right?
For someone who works in tech, you're completely clueless (or pretend to be) about how one of the largest tech corps operate as a business, NV have cheaped out yet again on VRAM, and cheaped on the crappy Samsung 8nm node, preferring to rob people with gimped memory in the hope AMD couldn't compete. Its is blatantly obvious that they intended to sell the gimped versions, hold back the full fat 70 and 80 cards, knowing that many afflicted with FOMO and buyer's remorse would buy the real card six months later.
But keep on shillin', at least until the future makes you look stupid, it's quite remarkable that you work in in tech but see it is a stagnant, and that these joke VRAM allocations are going to be sufficient for years and years to come, even weirder that you love the fact that NV has robbed you blind on VRAM.