Could you elaborate on the VRAM part if possible? I'd think that with this amount of 4k textures per person you'd reach the limits of a low VRAM gpu quite quickly. In practice it _seems_ to run fine on a meager 3gb, but I'm wondering if using 2k textures instead would up my fps and loading time with acceptable-ish quality, and I haven't had the time to actually try it. A quarter the amount of texture data to load could be significant, maybe, if it doesn't look like ass?
VAM is probably pretty VRAM heavy, true. You could check that by monitoring VRAM usage in Task Manager's performance tab, or with a third party software like GPU-Z, HWInfo64 or MSI Afterburner. But usually if VRAM actually runs out, it will cause
very noticeable fps drops because your GPU will be storing data in the much slower main memory instead.
Just adding more VRAM won't increase your framerates if they're already playable, since having too little VRAM means you're probably looking at a slide show.
VRAM amount shouldn't matter for loading times. VRAM speed shouldn't matter either since the write speed of VRAM is
far faster than the read speed of the disk where the textures are loaded from.
Another thing is that games prevent you from running out of VRAM by keeping fewer textures cached in memory. The less you have cached the more you're going to see things like texture pop in, or momentary hitches as the game loads textures from the disk. So having a lot of VRAM can enable a smoother experience. I think it'd have to be a pretty extreme situtation where you'd be so strapped for VRAM that there's not even room for the textures currently required by what's being rendered, forcing the GPU to use main memory.
In any case, my point was that when it comes to GPUs, the performance of the GPU is the important metric, and the amount of VRAM is a less important metric.
Usually you'll want to pick the faster GPU over the one with more VRAM, but not always. Most of the time the amount of VRAM will be suitable for the GPU's performance, meaning that playable framerates will be achieved with settings that don't use up all the VRAM. But then again, as soon as there's one outlier game that uses much more VRAM than others due to e.g. very high res textures, you might see it being a seriously limiting factor.