The GTX 970 used to be the minimum card for blue team. I've played all of my VR gaming on one. Perhaps gains in resolution on new equipment have left them behind, but they should still be fine for a 1st generation HTC Vive.

I've also run VR games using Windows Mixed Reality headsets, which have a higher resolution than the 1st generation HTC Vive, and it also seemed just fine. Also, at the time, though it was several months back, the Steam VR test program still gave my GTX 970 a pass.

YouTuber Blunty once ran his 1st gen VR headset off of a GTX1050Ti laptop and said it was just fine "in a pinch." (I wouldn't recommend it for the very VR sickness prone, however.)

it was the minimum recommended by Oculus and may've been for Vive too, can't remember, at one point. But I think what they're saying is you can conceivably work on VR/AR without having world beating hardware (it really only becomes an issue when you want to test, I would imagine).

But maybe after getting some VR development under one's belt with a 970, that may give incentive to do the GPU upgrade if things progress accordingly.

There’s also the option of running a pair of 970s in SLI. That was my solution a couple years ago when it beat the 980Ti in both performance and price.