PRE9 No longer supports older nvidia card GPU's (?)

Question

I've started this new discussion rather than continuing GPU Effects in PRE7 but not in PRE9 as this focuses more on the cards rather than the effects. In this discussion I hope that users with nvidia cards could report what their card is, and whether or not GPU Effects/Transitions show.
My nvidia 8800GT performs exceptionally well with PRE7.
Scrubbing along the timeline, or changing timeline scaling results in almost instantaneous redrawing of thumbnails.
All GPU effects and transitions are available and work well.
But with PRE9:
Scrubbing along the timeline, or changing timeline scaling, results in an agonisingly slow redrawing of thumbnails.
GPU effects and transitions are not available.
It seems to me that PRE9 is either no longer supporting older cards, or is identifying cards incorrectly. My gut feel is the first - that PRE9 is only working with *specific* video cards.
I think this because:
Adobe PRE9 Help shows:
About GPU effects
If your computer has an AGP‑ or a PCI‑based
video card, it probably has a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). If
your GPU supports DirectX 9.x, Pixel Shader (PS) 1.3 or later, and
Vertex Shader (VS) 1.1 or later, you can use GPU‑accelerated effects. These
effects take advantage of the added video processing capabilities
of GPU cards, adding three‑dimensional realism to images.
You can find these effects in the GPU Effects menu in the Effects
view only if your computer has a supported GPU. (Some effect options
are available only if your graphics card supports Pixel Shader 2.0
or later and Vertex Shader 2.0 or later.) For details, see the system
requirements on the Adobe Premiere Elements product page
on the Adobe website.
I could not find graphics cards listed in Adobe Premiere Elements 9: System requirements. But I did find this on the Premiere Pro CS5 System Requirements:
Supported NVIDIA graphics cards for GPU acceleration
GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac OS)
GeForce GTX 470 (Windows)
Quadro 4000 (Windows)
Quadro 5000 (Windows)
Quadro FX 3800 (Windows)
Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro FX 5800 (Windows)
Quadro CX
It does make me wonder if PRE9 follows this restricted list of cards.
Another clue(?) is that the Adobe Knowledge Base 51526, Troubleshoot digital video playback, shows:
3. Switch the GPU playback option.
Note: This option is not present in Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0.
Adobe Premiere Elements  is designed to take advantage of display
cards with accelerated GPUs. If you are having playback issues, make
sure you use the correct GPU playback mode that corresponds with your
display card.
Enable GPU Playback: The setting if you have a GPU-accelerated display card.
Disable GPU Playback:The setting offers the lowest performance but
is appropriate for display cards that do not fully support Direct 3D
So the feature to manually describe your card to PRE9 *HAS* been deliberately removed, by inference leaving it totally to the application to decide whether or not your card is supported.
I'll be posting this information at the Adobe Bug/Feature report.
Cheers,
Neale
Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your children

Answer 1

No, and it doesn't support some new cards in particular configurations either.
The main ones affected are the laptop hybrids in Sony Vaio.  I have a Sony Vaio Z11, and the Z12 and Z13 are affected by exactly the same problem.
The nVidia video card is GT330M, which should support all sorts of things.  But the most recent driver that works in this hybrid configuration (the way it is set up by Sony) is 190.xx, which presumably doesn't support this.
So PRE9 loads with an error message, but I can't see anything in the video preview, which makes editing a little difficult.  It works fine in Sony Vegas though.
Sony Vaio with the auto-switching hybrid configurations are fairly common (they've sold well), and the Z11, Z12 and Z13 are a current and very powerful model (mine is Core-i7, 8GB RAM, SSD).  It is a laptop that looks good, so appeals to graphic artists and video editors.
Adobe possibly needs to fix this rather quickly, because there are complaints all over the forums and I can see a lot of people dropping Adobe Premiere Elements in favour of the Sony Vegas product simply because they can't make it work.  All it takes is the ability to switch OFF GPU processing!  Alternatively support for this card.
Hugo