My main problem with the extra vram is that its bad value for money. Its $10 worth of parts sold at big markup.
My perspective on this debate is as a programmer of several decades. The way software is written is it's designed and tested on hardware that can be bought or will be available when your program is released. If the hardware can't run it you can't test it. Now typically no software is targeted at hardware very small number of people have. So what as a developer I do is choose what my example low, medium, high and ultra levels are and take the lowest common denominators at those levels of all vendors hardware. You see that in the recommended specs where it says "i5 or equivalent". So any sensible developer would look at the current GPUs and expect 3GB in ultra end for vram, nvidia levels of compute and AMD levels of tessellation. Basically you have to select the lowest capabilities of the the main cards in a category.
This year we have had 3 games, none of them particularly amazing graphics wise, use 3GB of vram, and obviously many more that didn't. That isn't unreasonable because that is where the ultra market is in terms of capabilities. More than that is only AMD, the minority hardware provider.
But if we project out into the future the ultra settings will use more vram, most likely 6GB. But they will also want 2x the compute performance and tessellation perforomance to go out with it. Historically what this has meant is very low volume extra vram cards have rarely had even one game they ran that the lower vram ones didn't. But right now we have 3 games that break that rule.
I don't really know what it all means but I highly doubt they will go above 3GB as there are just too few cards to pay for the feature to be worth it. It would be unbalanced compared to today's hardware. But these three games are unbalanced with 1 setting for textures.
My theory as to why is that these are console ports, and not very good ones. The problem is most likely the developers were developing on PCs with dual 680s and 7970 hardware or maybe even 780s and were expecting that level of performance from the consoles. They then found out they were mid range GPUs but with gobs of vram and in order to keep visuality fidelity up they pushed more towards textures and polygon counts to make the game sharp. They still struggled with resolution but it looked better than just pairing back performance to make it fit. The problem of course is all the GPUs in the PC space are based on 2 year old architectures and are awaiting the new silicon process at which point their available vram will exceed what the console can actually use (which is most likely 4GB Max).
So to your 3GB v 6GB it really depends on whether you believe most developers will target console first and making the PC port unbalanced in hardware, or maybe you think they will target the 290s mostly ignoring nvidia for high end despite sales being 2 to 1 in favour of nvidia or maybe you buy into developers being lazy argument. I personally always view it as the software has to match existing hardware or it can't sell and these 3 games should be outliers. Buy the 6GB, most likely it will end up a waste of money just like in the past, but if you don't intend to buy the next gen of cards maybe it will payoff. You are being ripped off, the price of it remains my main concern with it, that and it's historically poor value. But we have 3 examples of games pushing up there.
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