Don't do that to yourself. Not only are you worth more than that, but doing so would only bond you to two more hypercapitalist shitboots than you already are.
Stay strong. Spite is a wonderful motivator, if nothing else.
Seconded, friend gave me his Vive after upgrading, I used the thing for about two months and now maybe once a year if someone wants to try VR for the first time.
I always wonder how these places don't get ripped off left and right by people just making the first payment and bailing with the hardware but i suppose they probably just make up for it from the handful of suckers that actually keep paying for stuff.
these types of "rent-a-center" businesses don't exactly target people with credit scores that can be damaged much (it can only go so low), these are the kind of places people who are extremely irresponsible with their money go to get things because they literally have no other option.
I suppose if you could put custom firmware on the card, you could have host-side software that talks to something remote and to the card and has to activate the GPU each session.
I think that the issue here is less the technical barriers and more "the financial side doesn't seem to make a lot of sense".
I doubt that leasing physical possession of a GPU makes much sense unless there's a serious market for secondhand GPUs. Then the leasing party can transfer the thing to someone else who wants it down the line, and you can derive benefit from that reuse. But that demand doesn't really exist today. Maybe if the rate of increase of performance on GPUs stagnates.
It can make sense to do something today like vast.ai, where one buys access to a remote GPU, if one has "bursty" needs. Like, maybe someone needs access to a high-end GPU for AI stuff, but only on a sporadic basis.
I'm actually the target audience for this - or I would be if I had the money for it. I get tired of having to buy and configure new hardware every couple of years just to keep up with new software.
Good news, Moore's law and dennard scaling is pretty much over. We could (in a better system) buy for the next decade. Unfortunately this is not profitable so it won't happen