nvidia display driver 31.0.15.3623 works better than the latest bleeding edge driver from nvidia.
Might mean I need a new video card?
This is driver as provided with 536.23. Ironically this version is fairly heavily panned for being unstable, though it sounds like it’s pretty good if it works.
It’s not unheard of for certain tasks to perform better with a specific driver version. Newer features and fixes - especially those which are security related (GPU drivers are still kernel level) - can result in some tasks simply not being as quick any more, though they’re generally more accurate (whether it’s noticeable or not) or have some other not-necessarily-desirable added benefit.
AI users, for example, found that 531.61 performed better than any driver up until recently. This is because newer drivers added a feature that allowed VRAM spill-over into system RAM, which was nice because it meant your task wouldn’t immediately fail if you ran out of VRAM but not nice in that even a little overflow due to slack garbage collection would cripple your performance. More recent drivers allow you to toggle that behaviour.