How much video ram is 'enough'?

[tricky]

Silly question of course, but thoughts on this.
If we're all going to need 24GB video RAM to fit the sorts of complex scenes we all want to be working on - multi-building developments with lots of trees, plants, cars, furniture etc - its going to be mighty expensive.
For 'normal' people with an 8GB card, are there solutions to make Lavina a viable working solution?

[npg]

If you have specific scenes in mind (and they don't crash on your pc due to insufficient ram), you could check Help->Debug Log to see some info on geometry and texture VRAM usage. If geometry takes most memory, then instancing and lower level of detail could help, depending on what the source app allows (e.g. V-Ray in Revit has a tessellation parameter). For textures obviously lower resolution could help.

We plan to improve the peak memory usage when processing geometry during scene initialization.

We expect the next generation of GPUs to have more memory, but I don't know what the pricing will be. History shows that as soon as memory (or processing) capability is increased, users manage to use it up very quickly and it is never enough