Not really new, Nvidia's GTX 1070 launched in 2016 with 8 GB of VRAM and they've been slow walking VRAM increases for the last decade.

Today's RTX 5060 has 8 GB for basically the same price that the 1070 did.

For $650 you can go up to 12 GB in the 5070, if you want 16 GB it's $1000 for the 5070 Ti, or hundreds more than that for the 5080.

I know there's inflation and $380 in 2016 was more money than it is today, but if you'd asked me 10 years ago I would've bet on VRAM capacity doing better than "the same money is worth less but still gets you exactly same amount of memory 10 years from now."

With prices going up, I half expect Nvidia to launch the RTX 6070 and tell everyone "It has 4 GB of memory and we think you're going to love it. $900." Or they'll just stop bothering with consumer GPUs entirely.

1060 6GB here. Figured the headroom would get me a couple extra years out of it. At this rate I’m wondering if the card is going to outlast the concept of owning graphics cards. Partly because, as you mention, maybe NVIDIA will stop selling them. Partly because, maybe APUs will get good enough…