So the main reason I upgraded to 24 is because steam stopped working on 22. Happened on multiple machines that I had 22 installed on, each one of them eventually just stopped launching steam. Now that I am on 24 steam works just fine, but the GPU can't find the drivers.
I will try the PPA route next if I can't get the apt install that Pavlos suggested to work. Thank you for the Link on how to do that.
Sorry for the slow response, with Christmas I was with family. I tried doing the 470 as you outlined but when I ran the command to see the driver inxi -F it was blank. In addition the UI looked a little off and games would not launch and crashed at start up.
So I tried option 1 that you outlined here, and after adding the PPA and updating it says that the 390 drivers are not found. I am reading through the docs you linked but for now it appears those drivers do not work on a default install.
The repository provides packages for jammy (22.04) and mantic (23.10), when you add-apt-repository it will (by default) filter packages for your current distribution (noble). If you want to try the packages for those earlier distributions (no guarantees!) you'd first need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dtl131-ubuntu-nvidiaexp-noble.sources and replace the line:
Suites: noble
With
Suites: jammy
Then after an apt update I see (on my noble install)
Of course, your solution may be to shell out for a new single-slot card - of which even the RX 6500 XT would be about twice as fast as an old 550 TI (with similar TDP).
I don't know that I will, I don't plan on buying a new card. If I can't get this one to work I'll just reinstall 22 LTS and try to fix the issue I was having with Steam instead since that seems like a more solvable problem at this point.
Steam should be supporting 22.04 still (and I was, until very recently, using it no problems).
Keep at it. You still have options, e.g. try an older mainline kernel with 24.04 and install the NVIDIA driver. OR you could dual boot 22.04 and play around with that - I think kernel 5.15 is the default so that should play ok with the NVIDIA 390 driver.