Took a couple of months. I wasn't posting constantly or spamming or anything. Just replying on threads that were interesting and started a thread that got a bit of activity. But wasn't in a rush. Luckily there was a discount recently too that meant I got to members+ sooner. (Extra daily...
I have used Silly Tavern integrated into oooba Text Gen UI, and you can download character cards from chub.ai to have a play/chat with. All running locally, but small VRAM/token size limits length of converstations/stories
Tend to avoid VNs that have mini games. All about the story/chars for me. I guess only exception was The Headmaster which had some simple puzzle stuff IIRC.
Last time I checked the render engine IRAY was NVIDIA only, so it may fall back to CPU rendering which will be too slow depending on resolution and scene complexity. 8GB VRAM should be good as a start point, I used to get away with a 6GB 1060 a couple of years back, but would run out of VRAM...