The newer versions of nvidia drivers were supposed to have completely solved the flickering when running fullscreen games but it was a flickering mess for me no matter what I tried.

Holy cows. We all have them. The software we've been using for decades and see no reason to change because they're working perfectly fine. Most often there isn't any reason to move to the new shiny, you're just creating an unnecessary workload and potential for problems that were already solved with the existing solution. But sometimes.. sometimes you're just being stubborn.