People don't seem to be talking about this, but why are the VRAM amounts so strange on 3000 series cards? 12gb on the 3060 but then 8gb for 3060 ti, 3070, 3070 ti, then only 10 on the 3080. Now we got all these weird variants like the 12gb 2060, 12gb 3080, 16gb 3070 ti. like what the hell are these numbers. maybe learn something from amd
The 3070, 3080, and 3090 series use GDDR6X instead of the vanilla GDDR6. This was for performance reasons as the GPUs need a lot of bandwidth to keep themselves busy. At the time, the only company who was making GDDR6X (Micron) only had 1GB chips available, with 2GB chips on the roadmap for 2021 (and that was just to get a production run rolling, not necessarily achieve what you'd call full-steam-ahead). Obviously, NVIDIA couldn't wait a year to release their flag ship card, so they made due with what was available.
However in GDDR6 land, where we have Micron, Samsung, and SKHynix as manufacturers, 2GB chips were available. Since midrange cards aren't as data hungry, they don't need as much performance, and it's likely that 2GB chips were the more economical solution. AMD can get away with using GDDR6 in their higher end cards with Infinity Cache supposedly, but who knows how much it actually helps them.
Sometimes you can't pick and choose between what makes sense on paper and what makes sense in reality.