There are games that can use up 2GB of on-board GPU memory right now, for textures/buffers/etc. It won't be difficult to use up as much as 8 in the near future when panel resolutions get higher - higher panel resolution means a demand for higher resolution textures.

Given this, I'm sure there are things they can do with that onboard memory in the display. Maybe buffer up a half dozen video frames with timing data for smooth high res video playback?

But we aren't moving the gpu to the screen.

With it's currently advertised feature set, there is no need for that much ram.

Assuming future-proofing support for 4k monitors with framebuffers in 16bit floating point format, That's still only 48mb per buffer and there is no reason to have more than two buffers in a screen.

Maybe they were 256 megabit chips.

The resolution of textures has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the size of the framebuffer is only 1920x1080x24 bits large,so 6075KB(5.93MB). Unless you are trying to imply that the memory in the monitor will be used as an extension of the GPUs memory, which I really don't see how it would work over existing connections and deal with the latency and relatively low bandwidth involved.

But since the primary market for this is gaming, you can't buffer up anything or you kill latency, which is even more important than smoothness.