VRAM is a fancy number for marketing, nothing more.
That certainly used to be the case, at one time there was not much benefit in having 3GB VRAM vs 1GB, for example. However, there are a few games now utilizing more than this for 1080p, especially when you use DSR or SSAA to render the game at higher resolution than your display.
because of a few non-optimized games?
8GB VRAM won't help with anything and certainly not against memory leak if foolproving was the idea behind it. It will onyl mean you can play slightly longer before the game crashes compared to the standard 4GB VRAM.
4GB VRAM is more than sufficient for everything short of possibly 4K where the devs went ham with texture sizes, in which case TMU count will be the bottleneck long before VRAM starts noticably limiting the performance.
Yep, for most games it will make no difference at all. In the past there were only a few games that ever utilized larger amounts of VRAM: id Tech games (Wolfenstein New Order, RAGE, upcoming DOOM4) games with ultra high res texture mods (Skyrim, GTA IV). Now we have seen two new recent titles that use higher amounts of VRAM, Shadow of Mordor and Lords of the Fallen.
Maybe this will be limited to these few games and future id Tech titles or the occasional bad port, but I would not be surprised if more and more games recommend higher VRAM to prevent hitching. For example, Witcher 3 will likely incorporate a similar in-game DSR setting like Shadow of Mordor, considering Witcher 2 was one of the first games to include super sampling.
As a result, in my case I would not buy a relatively expensive 4GB 970 or 980 SLI setup at this point when the 8GB versions will be available soon, particularly since I don't upgrade very often, I'd want this to last several years.
To be clear, going from, say 2GB VRAM to 8GB VRAM is not going to increase your frame rate. It just prevents hitching and stuttering for certain games that either handle streaming of texture data differently (id Tech engine), or use very high resolution textures, or poorly optimized textures, texture mods, etc. When space runs out in VRAM, the old texture data needs to be switched out and new textures loaded up from your drive and/or system RAM into the VRAM. "Hitching" occurs when a slight pause results from your texture data getting switched in/out of VRAM, loading up from the drive, etc.
If you don't have quite enough VRAM, you could have well over 60fps avg frame rate, but still experience hitching or stuttering in these games when your GPU has to pause to wait for new data to be loaded.
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