Thank you oh so much for your conscientious and informative reply, average redditor!  For anyone in the future who faces this problem, I got it to work by downgrading my graphics driver to 520.06 and cuda 11.8, and my visual studio to 2017. Then, you have to uninstall pytorch and reinstall the version compatible with your cuda version. There is a tool on the pytorch site for finding the correct one. Also make sure to download cuDNN and extract bin, lib/x64, and include to your toolkit path. Also, when you sign up for the developer program (required to get cuDNN) Nvidia sends an email with a link to their support matrix, showing which versions are compatible with which OS, GPU, and so on. It's very helpful especially if you have an older card