PrPro 5.5 and nVidia GeForce 7600 GT - do they get along..?

Question

This question should probably be directed to nVidia, but since I know that this forum is used by some very talented people, my hopes are that there's one out there that can help..:
After installing Premiere Pro 5.5, using 2 x nVidia GeForce 7600 GT GPUs, I've experienced multiple BSOD's while exporting HD footage from PP 5.5 through Adobe Media Encoder 5.5. Furthermore I've experienced several occations of my screens going black for a second, followed by a "Your GPU driver stopped working and was restarted" Windows message.
I suspected the problems to be related to the co-relation between PP 5.5 and my GPUs (the "driver stopped"-thing almost for certain) and by checking the Adobe GPU compliance list and not finding my GPU there, my suspicion was enhanced.
However, on its driver download site nVidia states that the latest driver 275.33 "Supports the new GPU-accelerated features in Adobe CS5". This statement is not limited to certain versions of GeForce GPU's, so I have to assume that it counts for the 7600 family as well.
So my questions are as follows:
• Am I right in assuming that my BSOD problems can be related to the GPU?
• If so: Keeping in mind that nVidia states that the 275.33 driver supports Adobe CS5's GUP accelerated features, is there any way around forging out a fortune on a new GPU to make things work as intended..?
My set-up:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ 2200 Mhz • Motherboard: M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition • RAM: 4 GB Kingston HyperX pc3200 • GPU: 2 x MSI NX7600GT Diamond Plus (Sli) • Harddisks: 4 x Hitachi SATA, total of 1360 GB • OS: Win 7, 64 bit

Answer 1

Arne,
Don't feel so bad about this. You're not alone in experiencing such indifferent support. AMD, the owner of ATi, is even rougher than Nvidia when it comes to support of older GPUs: AMD has ceased further driver releases for all of its GPUs older than the HD 2xxx series except for critical compatibility fixes (the so-called "legacy support" status), beginning with the Catalyst 9.4 drivers (which pre-date the release of Windows 7).
By the way, if you don't perform any tweaking or hacking (software-wise), the only Nvidia GPUs that are certified to run in GPU-accelerated mode in CS5.5 are:
GeForce GTX 285
GeForce GTX 470
GeForce GTX 570
GeForce GTX 580
Quadro FX 3700M
Quadro FX 3800
Quadro FX 3800M
Quadro FX 4800
Quadro FX 5800
Quadro 2000
Quadro 2000D
Quadro 2000M
Quadro 3000M
Quadro 4000
Quadro 4000M
Quadro 5000
Quadro 5000M
Quadro 5010M
Quadro 6000
Quadro CX
The other GeForce GPUs of the GeForce 8xxx or later series with 896MB or more RAM can be made to work in the GPU-accelerated mode in CS5.5 by modifying the cuda_supported_cards.txt file. Your 7600 GT will not work at all in that mode because not only the card has too little RAM, but is also too old.
Hope this helps.