I have a 970 4GB card that still runs games like far cry 5 at high settings 60 fps on a 1080p monitor. But its really only going to do that for games 2018 or older. It also has 4 gig of vram which really needs to be the minimum. You can get these cards really cheap second hand now as people seell off their mining cards but beware of that. If you go new get at least a 1060 6GB card if you can. I'm not sure where the talk for 16-32 GB of vram came from but that is highly unrealistic cost-wise when speaking of Vram and not even that common. Both these cards I mentioned will handle what you want though. The hard drive will be slowing you down as even my 2012 setup haa a 7200rpm drive speed which yiou should aim for minimum if you cant get ban SSD. SSD is great and dropping in cost but you'll mainly see benefits in streaming of large textures like in open world games. If you don't play those games SSD is overkill and will only help slightly with loading times(although its a huge improvement to desktop/browsing experience because of the speed programs open).
I was wondering if my video card was at fault. Any recommendations for a budget card that will play games that are a few years old with little difficulty?