Finally pulled the trigger on a GTX 470...
 

...after months of promises to upgrade from my then-current HD 5770 to an NVIDIA card so that I could use MPE's GPU acceleration feature.

After testing my i7 system using PPBM5 with this card (the driver version used is the latest 258.96 drivers), I can say that my view is a bit mixed. The MPEG-2 DVD speed is actually slower than with the HD 5770. On the plus side, given my overclock and the memory speed, the MPE times are a little over 10x faster than in software-only mode (and the timeline rendering speed in software-only mode is about the same as it was with the 5770).

So, anybody with a GTX 4## series card, which driver version do you think is best?

I would appreciate your opinions and answers.

By the way, I will be submitting my initial result to the PPBM5 site shortly.

Finally got that system on the PPBM5 list.

My system has been tested with the latest 258.96 drivers. And although my results didn't seem all that much different in most tests, the overall performance is now much better balanced compared to what I had previously achieved with the ATi HD 5770 card (which does excel in standard-definition DVD encodes in CS5 but cannot use hardware MPE acceleration at all at the present time).

This means that until Adobe adds support for OpenCL in MPE (which is unlikely to occur for the foreseeable future), I'd recommend the use of the higher-end NVIDIA cards for CS5. And I would hold off on recommending the new GTX 460 for CS5 until the drivers for that card mature a bit.

I just re-ran the PPBM5 test after replacing my system hard drive and adding a side-panel fan to the case. Also updated Premiere Pro from 5.0.1 to 5.0.2 and AME from 5.0.0 to 5.0.1. Now I'm getting 80-ish second times for the AVI disk test, the MPEG-2 DVD encoding and the H.264 Blu-ray encoding tests - a far cry from the 130-ish-second time that I had been getting previously in the MPEG-2 DVD test.

And finally, with 5.0.2 the hack is no longer necessary with the GTX 470.