PP 15.4 Nvidia GPU Acceleration quits working randomly

I’ve been working in Premiere Pro (PP) for a while now with no issues.  As of this week, hardware encoding, via Nvidia CUDA simply stopped working.  Editing and rendering times are now unbearably slow and the program is borderline unusable.  Task Manager confirms almost no GPU is being used when working in PP.  I’ve made no hardware changes to the computer and the only software changes have been a driver update and maybe a PP program update?

Curiously, In GeForce Experience (which optimizes various programs for hardware acceleration) PP no longer shows up in the list of programs software optimized for hardware encoding.  My other programs (Bridge, Lightroom, LR Classic, Davinci Resolve, VLC, and OBS studio) are all still listed as hardware optimized and work fine.  PP was listed here as well, but is now missing, seeming to suggest that the software no longer “sees” or supports the program.

Symptoms and things I have done to troubleshoot
- Uninstalled/reinstalled graphics driver
- Reverted back to older version of the graphics driver
- Uninstalled/reinstalled Nvidia GeForce Experience
- Manually located PP in GeForce experience to try and add the program.  (program would not add).
- Uninstalled/reinstalled Premiere Pro
- Tried an older version of Premiere Pro  (no hardware acceleration there either)
- Tried exporting video in Adobe Media encoder (with hardware acceleration enabled). Still hardware acceleration.

I’m at a complete loss here.  I’ve never had this issue before.  Without hardware acceleration, PP is borderline unusable for me and I cant really finish any of the projects I’m working on.

Any idea how to correct this situation?

**SYSTEM INFO**
Ryzen 3900x, x570 motherboard, 32GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 1070 8GB graphics card (driver 471.21 & 466.77)
Windows 10 home, version 21H1, build 19043.1110
Premiere Pro Version 15.4.0 (build 47)