I am planning on buying the GTX 970 4GB and was wondering whether or not 4 gigs will be sufficient for heavy modding in games like skyrim and gta 5 in the future. Is this a good buy for heavy modding or would something like the new Sapphire R9 290X 8GB be a better buy when it is available again.
The answer is... it depends. It depends on what mods you are planning. If you are going to be doing a lot of texture packs and mods that are processed at the GPU level, then it might be worth it. Many mods are more CPU intensive so the vram wouldn't really have much to do with it. FYI, team green is planning an 8GB version of both the 970 and 980 in the near future. Just food for thought.
It also depends on your monitor. If you are running a 1080p screen, then 4GB will be plenty. Its when you step to the 1440p and UHD or 4K that will start really needing that extra vram.
Hope that helped.
I'm going to be using Autodesk Maya to make very detailed models and whatnot, would the extra vram help for that?
I'd say you'd run out of gpu horsepower before you ran out of ram when it comes to skyrim texture mods. As for autodesk I'm not honestly not sure, i wish there were more becnhamrks on 3d modeling software.