Nvidia has announced that it will no longer offer its display drivers on old CPUs that don't support POPCNT. The good news is that it should not affect most modern computers.

Users who try to install the latest GPU drivers on unsupported systems may experience a blue screen of death (BSOD) with an error that says SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED.

Nvidia had published a knowledgebase article in June, confirming that its Windows drivers for older CPUs is reaching end-of-life support. The last Nvidia drivers to support the legacy processors are 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, could result in a boot loop that ends up in Windows Recovery. You may also want to make sure that Windows Update doesn't try to install the GPU drivers automatically.

Unless you have a computer with a CPU that is nearly two decades old, you need not worry about this. Let me explain. POPCNT stands for Population Count, it is an instruction set that it is used by the CPU for some computational tasks. These instructions were first introduced as part of SSE4.2 in Intel Core Nehalem and AMD K10 Barcelona processors way back in 2008. I talked briefly 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 just use the Coreinfo tool from Microsoft's Sysinternals, and run the following command in the terminal.

.\coreinfo64 -f

As noted by Neowin and X user, Bob Pony outlined that the EOL support could affect obsolete CPUs such as a Core 2 Duo processors, that may be equipped with a relatively-modern GPU, e.g. a Maxwell architecture card like the GeForce GTX 750 ti or the GTX 950. While Nvidia continues to support older-gen graphics cards, users won't be able to upgrade the drivers for it because their CPU is no longer supported. And if they did, well, that's where the BSOD rears its ugly head.

Nvidia is not the only one to drop support for CPUs that do not support POPCNT. Microsoft ditched the instruction set in the Windows Insider Program in February 2024. Newer versions of Windows 11 will not install on computers that do not support SSE4.2. It might finally be time to upgrade your PC to get it working with Windows 11. Or, you may want to consider switching to Linux instead.

That said, Nvidia could have handled this matter differently. It may have been better to prevent the installation of the drivers on the affected systems with a pop-up to warn the user about the EOL for their CPU, or just 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 a headache and an unusable PC.

Do you have a computer that does not support SSE4.2?