I recently found myself with 2 nVidia 2060 cards with 8GB VRAM. I'll spare the details, but through a weird upgrade process, I had the cards but no machine. However, since I had the cards, I popped one of them into a workstation that I had, just to "see what MyWhoosh HD looked like."
After watching some races for about 30 minutes, I was hooked. Why? Because there somebody at MyWhoosh that really is talented. The scenery is incredibly engaging. I'm not an artist, but there are scenes that I just think are beautiful. The other thing that the HD version does is give you an audience of people that cheer you on as you race. I don't understand the psychology behind it, but as an athlete for many years with some real life crowds, somehow those spectators just are really enjoyable.
My previous platform felt like I was doing pretty well, as I had bought some second hand HP Business notebooks for a little over $200 on eBay, but only could run normal MyWhoosh. I do run them into an external monitors that is in front of our bikes. The laps tops would run somewhere around 20-25 fps, and its not like MyWhoosh has a lot of action, and my wife and I thought they were pretty great. However, compared to the MyWhoosh HD version, it simply was not as engaging. Did a search on eBay, and found two Dell XPS 8930 MT Intel i5-9400 2.9GHz for a little around $220 shipped with a tiny SSD, which was fine by me. They advertised "Intel Graphics," as they do have standard motherboard down graphics. The key about the boxes is the power supply is big enough to drive the the nVidia 2060 cards.
I get both PCs in, and I open them up, and notice that both look like they have a dedicated graphics card. So, I pop open the box, and they both have a non-advertised 1060 card. One with 3GB vram and one with 6GB. So, now I'm stuck. So, this turns into a lab. The 1060 are incredibly old, and I didn't even expect good support. So, I loaded up MyWhoosh HD.
The 3GB just does not work well. So there is a limit.
The 6GB 1060 act ran the game quite nicely. Now, my heads up shows 90-100% GPU utilization, but it never stalls, and the scenery is as engaging as my 2060 cards.
I did end up using the 2060 with 8GB, but you really cannot tell the difference to the the ancient 6GB card.
The first race we did was in Japan, and the cherry blossoms were drifting down, and my wife said, "Wow this is really nice." When you go across a bridge, you get the fish (or mud) in the water. Animals come out of the woods, and there were quite a few ninjas on the course. The shadows are better than the normal version, and water on the roadway nicely glistens.
MyWhoosh is free, so you are clearly saving money over Zwift. And it is easy to think, "I'll just find the cheapest hardware to run it on." However, my guess is that if you look for a bargain, you'll find a nice platform to run it on. After using it now for a couple weeks, it is definitely one of the better purchases I've made for entertainment.
Getting a free video card was a real deal. However, even though it works, I would probably tell most people to push to the 2060, which would add around $180 to the base system.