[qayxc]

It's not on purpose but a direct consequence of the computational requirements of the model.

I say this often and I cannot stress this enough: this is not magic! High quality results require a lot of computation and with it a lot of other resources like VRAM.

This area of research has always been resource intensive and no one was surprised by this back in the 1990s when some research required hardware that wasn't available to mere mortals (looking at you, SGI Indigo and Octane).

You should look at it be the other way around: it's astonishing that you can use off-the-shelf consumer hardware (here: mid-range gfx cards) to participate in and benefit from cutting edge research.

Even better yet, services like Google CoLab even allow you to meddle with this for free if you don't own the required hardware.

BTW, it's not the researchers' fault that the market is f'ed up again due to shortages and crypto mining. Otherwise you'd be able to buy a 12 GB card for around $330 (e.g. the RTX 3060), which doesn't sound particularly outrageous to me.