In February of this year turned out to bethat some older computers cannot run the latest versions of Windows 11 due to the lack of the POPCNT instruction set. Now it’s been reported that Windows 10 users are also experiencing the POPCNT issue, and the cause is NVIDIA graphics drivers.
About a month ago, NVIDIA published knowledge base article about ending support in their drivers for older computers without the POPCNT instruction set. This is not just an informational message: installing the 555 or later driver on a system with a supported Nvidia graphics card and an unsupported processor causes the entire system to crash, up to and including BSOD with the SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED error code.
Although these same processors are no longer officially supported by Microsoft’s Windows 10 / Windows 11, they still worked. But if their user tries to install the 555+ display drivers — it is a guaranteed BSOD. Users of such computers would be well advised to configure Windows Update settings to prevent the operating system from automatically downloading a 555 or later driver.
We are talking mainly about Core 2 Duo processors, which are not very many left — especially when combined with current NVIDIA graphics cards. Therefore, this is not the most common case — but still possible. But if a system without SSE4.2 and with a GTX 750 Ti or GTX 950 graphics card fails to boot after updating the graphics driver, we now know why.
Source: Neowin
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