I've got an RX 580, and it's happy with the Lenovo Explorer running in the "VR High" preset in EDProfiler. The 970 is almost equivelent to the 580 with a half the VRAM.
With the way the market is currently, I'd recommend a 2060 Super. Plenty of vram for the framebuffer, and it's about twice as powerful as your 970, and no blower.
Though if you want to do all AMD, the 5700xt is an excellent choice as well. It's got roughly the same compute power as the 2060 Super, though it's a bit more power hungry. And avoid the blower coolers. Those are always a bad choice.
My personal card recommendations:
5700 xt
2060 Super (Yes, I'm super MSI biased :P)
Honestly a laptop is your bottleneck. Build your own with these parts or near these parts this is a baseline:
| Component | Title | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Core i7 7700K | $343 (Amazon US) |
| GPU 1 | MSI RTX 2060 Super Gaming X | $409 (Amazon US) |
| RAM 1 | (2x8GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V 3200 | $76 (Amazon US) |
| Motherboard | MSI MPG Z390M Gaming Edge | $149 (Amazon US) |
| Storage 1 | Empty Storage | $0 (Amazon US) |
| Power Supply | Empty Powersupply | $0 (Amazon US) |
| Case | Empty Case | $0 (Amazon US) |
| Monitor 1 | Empty Monitor | $0 (Amazon US) |
| Total Price | $977 | |
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