Low FPS, used to be OK.

Not older than your card. Videocard manufacturers make driver improvements mainly for the current generation of chipsets they have on the streets. The 4x.xx were developed along the geforce 4 series. 5x.xx were released with the geforce FX (5) series, and so they were optimized for them. Then the geforce 6 series came out and 6x.xx saluted them. Now you have 7x.xx, what is somewhat agaisn't the usual way things are done, but i think you get the point. You'll face 0 improvements using so new drivers, and sometimes they even work worse for older cards, because, simply put, they don't care about them anymore. They'd rather have you buy a new one than use yours for years and years.

To solve the problem with peops, play with the stretching options. Anyway, if peops is working well, your videocard isn't configured properly. Either an old installation of the drivers is conflicting with your current ones, or some other kind of problem arised. Try seraching the net for some driver cleaning utility for nvidia, and then reinstall. Be sure to disable any kind of anisotropic filtering ro antialiasing.