As an "artist", sometimes you have to push yourself.
I am glad I had such a crappy card for this to start with now as it taught me a lot.
But you can lower the texture resolution lower... Scene Optimizer will cut the texture size in half (which leads to 1/4 the size) and save a new version. It can go smaller than that, but I find just half was good, on my old card anyhow. I have 12G on this card so I do the opposite now, been raising the quality up on a few characters if I am close.
I just watched some tutorials on the topic actually... some good ones here:
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been thinking about looking into making my own clothes in Blender for Daz (they have a tutorial for that as well).