And a significant portion of that increase probably just comes from the faster VRAM and bigger cache.

I completely agree on the artificial segmentation. It's so obviously contrived it should be embarrassing. Maybe the RTX 20 and 30 series don't have the horsepower for multi-frame generation, but they certainly should for single frame. Assuming you want to use it which is debatable.

Not that I ever intend to spend thousands of dollars on a GPU, but I'm interested to see what nVidia does with all of that extra "AI" processing power. I've seen speculation on a new texture compression method as a possible benefit. If that pans out it could it could make the 5070 more attractive.

I think they make a cream for that now.