Owners of older Windows PCs may run into problems when updating to Nvidia’s latest driver update. The update triggers a BSOD if your CPU is unable to handle a certain instruction.

New week, new problems for Windows. This time it is Nvidia that is making Windows users sweat. A recent driver update for graphics cards of the Maxwell generation can cause the dreaded under Windows 10 Bluescreen of death provoke on outdated CPUs.

Fortunately, unlike the recent Windows crashes, the problems will only affect a very limited number of Windows users. The blue screen can only be triggered if the CPU does not support the POPCNT instruction: an instruction that counts 1 values ​​in a binary structure. Nvidia has now decided not to support CPUs that do not have the instruction starting with release 555.

The probability that your device does not meet this condition is very low. POPCNT has been integrated into almost all Intel and AMD chips since 2008.

Counting bits

If your PC has been in use for several years, you can use the Coreinfo tool (available from the page website) to check if your machine is POPCNT compliant. After installing the tool, run it via PowerShell and you will get an overview of the technical specifications of your processor.

Microsoft uses the presence of POPCNT as one of the measures to determine whether a computer is too outdated to support. Without POPCNT, you can also forget about upgrading to Windows 11: your PC simply won’t boot anymore.