Some missconceptions here, I think.
I run a SLI GTX 670 OC 4GB setup right now with a raid0 of SSDs to host OS and games along with competent CPU and RAM. Yes, DX9 shadows the VRAM in RAM but that will not affect FPS performance at all. All it means, really, is that you need enough regular RAM to hold the complete VRAM + OS, other apps + rest of Skyrim.
My current modded setup is a mix of 2k and 1k textures. Landscape is 1k, for instance. Most armor, weapons, character textures are 2k. I eat up 4GB VRAM like it was icecream. There are many, many places where I would benefit from switching up to 8GB VRAM.
As mentioned before VRAM is FIFO but what isn't mentioned is that at each exchange of loaded textures you get HDD activity, traffic over buses etc. and that will lead to stuttering. If your card is able to load up more textures in it's VRAM that it does not have to dump out then the stuttering will be initial and then not come back until VRAM needs to be refreshed either for other reasons or new textures need to be loaded in. Of course, the fact that the textures goes into RAM might on some systems have an impact on stuttering, on some others not so much.
As for FPS there are a number of things in Skyrim which will influence in. I regularly run around with 45-55 FPS when not a lot is going on in terms of... scripts!
Scripts have an impact on FPS, probably more so than current GPU grunt power. My cards never go over 70%ish utilization, and that's not because Skyrim is poorly optimized or something such. If I tack on higher meshes for certain things I will see the GPU usage go up - but if I remove my script heavy mods the GPU usage will also go up, I can easily max out the cards by smashing in all the higher density meshes I can find without bothering with script heavy mods.
Another thing that will influence your GPU usage is the use of added post-processing such as AA, ENBs and the like.
Will you benefit from going to 8GB 980? Even without taking into account that you'd quadruple your available VRAM it's a definite yes. Your cards GPU power is about slightly less than half of that 980. To say that the biggest difference between 680 and 980 is power consumptions just shows you need to read up.
Your 20ish FPS you get now will go 40+ if the rest of the system can match, and that's not even taking into account how much less stuttering you get from loading textures from your HDD.
A little about CPU usage is good to know too. Skyrim isn't very CPU hungry, one would think, but that's where the poor optimization comes in. Skyrim can run on all cores available to it, with some smaller ini tweaks, but it will not utilize the cores effectively.
A newer Core i5 which is faster per core than a slightly older Core i7 will most likely be able to produce higher FPS. Again, though, this depends on what you are doing with your game and if you use script heavy mods, HDT physics etcs or not. SKSE extensions such as HDT physics will use 8 cores when available, and will definitely be able to take advantage of that.
EDIT: I forgot to mention one thing.
4k/8k textures. As mentined before it doesn't mean you need a 4k screen to see the difference, it's not really related at all. However, texture processing will suffer in GPU power from going to higher resolution textures simply because there is more to compute, it's heavier. Not to mention that data from higher texture mods will have to transfer from hdd to both RAM and VRAM in Skyrims case.
Edited by DigitalVixen, 02 December 2014 - 10:47 PM.