New Nvidia drivers are causing blue screens on PCs with older CPUs

Recent Nvidia driver updates are causing Windows 10 or 11 PCs using older processors to crash. The infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has made a comeback on systems using an Intel Core 2 Duo, for example, that have updated to driver version 555 or newer.

The information was first released by Bob Pony (@TheBobPony), and was confirmed by Nvidia itself. The problem, in fact, did not arrive without warning, but the level of the crash may surprise some users.

What happens is that the GPU manufacturer ended its support for processors that do not support POPCNT (Population Count) instructions last month. This is the case for very old units, such as the Core 2 Duo, since the feature began appearing in 2006 in AMD CPUs and 2008 in Intel.

Therefore, PCs with one of these processors and a GPU still supported by Nvidia, such as the GTX 750 Ti, may experience a “light” brick when updating the driver. It is not a complete bricking because the system gets stuck on booting and blue screen and restarts until entering recovery mode.

Nvidia leaves old CPUs in the past

Unfortunately, there aren’t many workarounds to this problem. Eventually, every tech company starts to leave older hardware models in the past, and that’s the case with Nvidia for non-POPCNT CPUs.

The recommendation for users in this situation is to simply not update to driver 555 or newer. This is clearly not an ideal solution, as updates are important for system optimization and security.

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Alternatively, TechSpot cites Nouveau as a possible source of drivers. It’s an open-source project that provides drivers for Nvidia GPUs. As always, we caution that installing unlicensed third-party software is done at your own risk.