If you are starting from scratch and buying new then forget it as £500 simply isn't enough. Anything you buy brand new for £500 is going to leave you very disappointed. You should be able to manage something half decent although older second hand but you are restricteds to what you can pick up on Ebay or Faceebook marketplace and that's a minefield. Do you have a monitor and keyboard/mouse because if not you are going to struggle even going second hand. Personally I would want to double your budget for a decent gaming experience if buying new and probably £700 if buying second hand and you need a monitor and keyboard/mouse as well
I have over 1200 hours in ATS/ETS2 and gaming at 1440p I was running out of vram in places (using mods) with a 8Gb RTX3070 so had to upgrade to my current RX7900GRE 16Gb card and that alone is more than your entire budget. Forget the minimum and recommended specs, a 2Gb gpu is not going to cut it and any gaming experience is going to be a miserable experience that will leave you wondering why you have spent all this money to have it looking so bad. Once you try mods from the workshop you are going to want more and if you use any graphics mods they are going to hit a gpu hard. You are going to need a M2 drive as well as it smooths out loading in game.
Looking ahead, a decent wheel and pedal set makes for a much more enjoyable gaming experience as well. Taking it further a shifter (I have a SKRT truck shifter) adds to the realism but all of this costs a lot of extra money. Yes, you can play with a controller but it's nowhere near as enjoyable.
