Raspberry pi zero with led matrix performance issues

I recently put together a little led scoreboard to run live scores of different professional sports and display on a 64x32 led matrix from adafruit. Im using a raspberry pi zero wh with an adafruit matrix bonnet. I have noticed that the screen is flickering and lagging quite a bit which is annoying. Admittedly, I just bought a cheap pi at the time to get me familiar with raspberry pi and I have been using a legacy os with a GUI (yes I know that’s probably slowing it down), but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas as to how to improve performance on the zero or if I should just invest in a better version of the pi.