People can play with "small" or "medium" models less powerfull and cheaper cards. A Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 card with "only" 12Gb VRAM can be found around €200-250 on second hand market (and they are around 300~350 new).
In my opinion, 48Gb of VRAM is overkill to call it "on a budget", for me this setup is nice but it's for semi-professional or professional usage.
There is of course a trade off to use medium or small models, but being "on a budget" is also to do trade off.