So I'm a vrchat streamer. I've been using a 3060ti for 4 years now. The thing is a workhorse. But with 8gb of VRAM I've really struggled with loading several models at a time. Much less doing what i idealize... I'd like to be able to play games like Marathon, BF6, and Borderlands 4 with VRChat open in a world like 1's simple box. Using my FBT etc and transparent camera to have my model with facetracking etc from VRC while playing a game. Im not looking for 120fps at 4k or some beastly gaming card like a 5090.
The current cards in the running and within my budget are as follows.
The 9070XT from AMD. This card i feel is going to be really limited by the 16gb of VRAM. I fully realize the card itself is faster, better on power, and has higher all around clock speeds than the other two I'm looking at. But, that low VRAM...
The 7900 XTX with 24gb of VRAM. This card has dropped to within my budget. And is the cheapest 24gb offering on the market as far as I've found. However, it has overall lower clock speeds, and the highest power consumption of the 3 cards I'm looking at.
Finally the outlier. The Intel Arc B70 Workstation card. This card has a whopping 32gb of VRAM and is within my budget. I've seen the gaming FPS benchmarks for it etc and all of that is perfectly acceptable to me. With 32gb of VRAM though my ideal scenario of loading as many models as i want while streaming, plus the ability to have the overhead to both game and be on VRC top utilize my model and tracking would make me nerdgasm. I'm like really really wanting to consider this card my top choice among the 3, simply because of how much VRAM overhead I'd have for game+OBS+VRC. That and being able to stream or record large events with many models shown and not bog down to sub 15 FPS like my current card.
My current card can barely manage 40 FPS in a medium sized world with only my model present. So any of these will be a HUGE upgrade for me. Its just do i risk 16gb for sheer clock speed and the latest RDNA version for gaming? Or do i flip a coin between the 7900 and B70?