Nvidia drivers are causing system crashes on old CPUs, forcing some Windows 10 and 11 machines into an endless BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) boot loop. The issue affects machines running old processors that don’t support OPCNT.
OPCNT (Population Count) is a CPU instruction that counts the number of set bits in a binary value. It’s used in various computational tasks, including artificial intelligence.
For example, a machine powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU plus an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 or newer will suffer from a BSOD after installing new GPU drivers. This includes any driver starting from version 555. Nvidia did inform users about this limitation ahead of time, but it seems many didn’t get the notice. It doesn’t help that Microsoft auto-updates Windows drivers without users’ consent.
“Beginning with the Release 555, NVIDIA display drivers will no longer support older CPUs that do not support POPCNT (Population Count) instruction. While these CPUs are already officially not supported on Microsoft’s Windows 10/Windows 11, if a user with a PC using an unsupported CPU attempts to install R555+ display drivers, the PC will bugcheck/BSOD when booting into Windows,” says Nvidia in its EOL Windows driver support announcement.
You may wonder why someone would use such old processors with a new operating system. Well, sometimes you just don’t have a choice. For example, Valve has terminated support for Steam on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. This meant that whether you play the latest AAA games or Pong, you will need Windows 10 or newer. As for system compatibility, there are plenty of tools and workarounds that allow you to install Windows on officially unsupported hardware.
Thankfully, new drivers are not important for these old machines as they are likely packing slow ageing GPUs that no longer get driver optimisations anyway. That said, if it hasn’t already, Nvidia should add a warning message when detecting an incompatible hardware combo to avoid messing up people’s PCs.