New Nvidia graphics drivers for GeForce video cards (version 555 and newer) may cause a blue screen of death (BSOD) on older Windows computers due to the latter’s lack of support for POPCNT (Population Count) instructions, reports TechSpot.
Image Source: TechSpot
The problem affects PCs running Windows 10 running very old processors, such as the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, which are paired with still supported Nvidia graphics cards, such as the GeForce GTX 750 Ti and newer. There is no solution to this problem, but users can avoid it by not updating Nvidia drivers to version 555 or later.
The Blue Screen of Death appears with the error “System thread exception not handled” and occurs when installing Nvidia GeForce drivers version 555 and later on systems with supported Nvidia GPUs but unsupported CPUs. It is noted that this error can lead to serious problems, including system instability, data loss, and can also open a security hole in the PC, especially if users are unable to boot the computer correctly.
«Still using a Windows 10/11 PC with a non-POPCNT CPU (e.g. Intel Core 2 Duo) and a Maxwell generation Nvidia graphics card (e.g. GeForce GTX 750) or newer? Installing the latest Nvidia drivers will turn your PC into a brick. It will constantly reboot until it enters Windows recovery mode,” wrote one user of the social network X.
Last month, Nvidia officially announced it would end support for older Intel and AMD CPUs that don’t have support for the POPCNT instruction set. Unfortunately, the choice of alternative driver sources that support older processors is not so large. For example, Intel provides open source drivers included with most Linux distributions. But there is no additional official support. For older AMD/ATI video cards, unofficial driver assemblies are compiled by enthusiasts, who then publish them on unofficial repositories or as PPAs (Personal Package Archives) for Linux systems. In some cases, alternative open source drivers such as Nouveau (for Nvidia graphics cards) or Mesa (for AMD/Intel graphics) offer basic functionality support for older graphics cards, but the performance of these drivers is significantly limited compared to the official ones.