Fun fact: if I got a full refund for my midrange GPU that I bought two years ago I couldn't buy a similarly powerful GPU today. I'd have to fucking downgrade like an animal because prices are rising so much faster than performance.

tl;dr

25.90%

I had the exactly that experience a few years back. I ended up using an older smaller card I had used for our media system for almost a year. That was when everything that could do the least bit of crypto mining was insanely overpriced.
I had a card that got a defect under warranty, but the card cost 3 times as much at that time as I had paid, so obviously they just gave me my money back, which is perfectly legal. I sure hope it doesn't happen again. Although I could afford it, I would hate to have to pay the current crazy prizes.

Yes it is, although it is the most common at 25,9% only 10% have more, and more than 60% have less.

this is VRAM not RAM. 16gb is a lot.

Ah thanks. I'd expect most people to be at 8-12 range. Laptops even lower.

Indeed, it being most common was unexpected for me.

GPU

"Most common" (i.e. statistical mode) is often such a misleading thing to pay attention to because it's so sensitive to how the person doing the study chooses to group things. For example, also on the Steam Hardware Survey, it looks like Arch is more popular than Ubuntu, but that's because Arch (being a rolling release) is only one entry, while Ubuntu is separated out into versions.

Similarly, "16GB is most common" is easily confused with "most people have 16GB," which is very much not true. It's just that the majority, which is less than 16GB, is divided between people with 4, 8, 12, etc.

But also the most common, which was the point/question of the comment.

I have no idea why your previous comment was downvoted? It's absolutely valid IMO, sad to see you deleted it.
16 GB is still high end, but at the same time it has a big marketshare. Probably from RAM being way cheaper not that long ago, so it was also upper mid range. But now it is absolutely high end IMO.

Life is complicated, so summarising such things into a single number or a sentence comes with compromises. People just love to generalise and categorise things, no matter how feasible that really is. These summaries just scratch a very specific itch people seem to have.

The real hero. Thanks!

Yeah, but once was 4GB, then 8GB and now 16GB, without any group being held by most people.

Its the leading group. It shows the transition.

Now i feel less special with my 6950xt that i've had for a few years :(

People kept assuming I don't know the difference between RAM and VRAM which got annoying. I probably could have worded my comment better but I don't care enough to fix it.

OK I can see how that must have been extremely annoying, I noticed one myself, and wondered how one came to the conclusion that you weren't thinking of VRAM when both VRAM and high end GPU is part of the headline, and is the entire topic?