Thanks for the very detailed answer James, you're a legend. I hadn't even considered the GPU VRAM as a factor!
I've checked and my most complex scene so far is only 5GB, so an 8GB card should give me some headroom, I also suspect that there is a lot of optimisation that I should be doing on my scenes, especially with materials - I need to read up on that at some point, right now I'm just trying to get work delivered to my clients - I'm just about managing to blag everything right now :-)