Nvidia has announced that it will no longer provide its display drivers on older CPUs that do not support POPCNT. The good news is that this will not affect most modern computers.
Users who try to install the latest GPU drivers on an unsupported system may experience a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) with an error saying System thread exception not handled.
Nvidia published an article Knowledge base articles in June, confirming that its Windows drivers for older CPUs are reaching lifetime support. The last Nvidia drivers supporting legacy processors are the version 554 release drivers, so if you have a computer that doesn’t support POPCNT, you may want to stick with the last display driver for your machine. Trying to install newer drivers, i.e. version 555 and above, may result in a boot loop that ends in Windows recovery. You may also want to ensure that Windows Update doesn’t try to install the GPU driver automatically.
Unless you have a computer with a CPU that’s almost two decades old, you don’t have to worry about this. Let me explain. POPCNT stands for Population Count, it’s an instruction set used by CPUs for certain computational tasks. These instructions were first introduced in 2008 as part of SSE4.2 in the Intel Core Nehalem and AMD K10 Barcelona processors. I briefly talked about SSE4.2 in this article about Waterfox three years ago.
But, if you really want to check whether your PC supports POPCNT or not, you can simply use CoreInfo Tool From Microsoft’s Sysinternals, and run the following commands in the terminal.
.coreinfo64 -f
As told Neowin and x users, Bob Pony It was reported that EOL support could affect obsolete CPUs such as Core 2 Duo processors, which may be equipped with relatively modern GPUs, such as Maxwell architecture cards like the GeForce GTX 750 ti or GTX 950. While Nvidia continues to support older-generation graphics cards, users won’t be able to upgrade drivers for it because their CPU is no longer supported. And even if they did, well, this is where the BSOD shows its hideous side.
Nvidia isn’t the only company dropping support for POPCNT. Microsoft removed the instruction set in the Windows Insider Program in February 2024. New versions of Windows 11 won’t install on computers that don’t support SSE4.2. It might be time to finally upgrade your PC to work with Windows 11. Or, you could consider switching to Linux instead.
That being said, Nvidia could have handled this case differently. It would have been better to prevent the installation of the driver on affected systems with a pop-up warning the user about EOL for their CPU, or simply with a message that says “Your PC does not meet the requirements”, or something like that. While the number of affected users is unlikely to be large, blocking the driver could have prevented the system from crashing with a BSOD, and saved users from headaches and unusable PCs.
Do you have a computer that doesn’t support SSE4.2?
Thanks for reading..
