Happy to help!

To be fully fair; that's kinda what you would expect of consumer cards compared to workstation cards. VRAM is expensive and while these days people are using more VRAM than they used to when playing games there is an upper limit there because devs don't waste their time creating ultra huge textures that no-one will ever actually see.

Tasks like AI and professional 3D rendering have always benefitted from lots of VRAM, so the cards tailored for them came with more RAM but also very very high markups.

Yeah, the data is definitely not perfect. If I get a chance, I'll poke around and see if maybe it's one person throwing off the results. Maybe next time I'll toss "n=##" or something on top of the bars to show just how many samples exist for each card. I also eventually want to filter by optimization, etc. for the next visualization, though I'm not sure what the best way is to do that except for maybe just doing "best for each card" or something.

The link in the header post includes the methodology used to gather the data, but I don't think it fully answers your first question. I imagine there are a few important variables and a few ways to get variation in results for otherwise identical hardware (e.g. running odd versions of things or having the wrong/no optimizations selected). I tried to mitigate that by using medians and only taking cards with 5+ samples, but it's certainly not perfect. At least things seem to trend as you'd expect.

I'm really glad vladmandic made the extension & data available. It was super tough to find a graph like this that was remotely up-to-date. Maybe I'll try filtering by some other things in the near future, like optimization method, benchmark age (e.g. eliminating stuff prior to 2023), or VRAM amount.

For your last question, I'm not sure the host bus configuration is recorded -- you can see the entirety of what's in a benchmark dataset by scrolling through the database, and I don't see it. I suspect PCIE config does matter for a card on a given system, but that its impact is likely smaller than the choice of GPU itself. I'd definitely be curious to see how it breaks down, though, as my MoBo doesn't support PCIE 4.0, for example.