I think that’s the amount of memory that can be allocated in one chunk; however, all memory can be allocated (in several chunks). For my 6 GB card:
0.067616 [opencl_init] device 0 `GeForce GTX 1060 6GB' supports image sizes of 16384 x 32768
0.067620 [opencl_init] device 0 `GeForce GTX 1060 6GB' allows GPU memory allocations of up to 1519MB
(From: darktable 3.4/3.5 opencl slow on Windows 10 - #44 by kofa)
Memory info while proceccing an image:
FB Memory Usage
Total : 6077 MiB
Used : 5762 MiB
Free : 315 MiB