Play the original Quake on a PC just 5 or so years after it was made and the whole game is accelerated. When calculating time between frames, it was happening too fast and the code went ape shit.
As Katitof eluded: In the war for who has the fastest videocards, drivers were optimized for the coolest current games and the code that runs them. Newer cards are not optimized for old games because no one is buying a card based on its FPS for a 7 year old game. And the coding methods change for each generation of cards that comes out. So newer drivers may actually break the game. You could start with the OLDEST driver your NEW card has available and see how it goes.
I played Quake on my brand new desktop a couple summers ago and it worked perfectly.