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Nvidia has actually validated that brand-new graphics card chauffeurs will trigger blue screen crash loops on Windows 10 PCs that can't carry out a particular CPU direction called POPCNT (Population Count).
Particularly, older Windows 10 computer systems with CPUs that can't deal with the POPCNT direction will crash throughout Windows bootup if set up with Nvidia's graphics motorists from Release 555 (June 2024) or later on.
Beginning with Release 555, Nvidia's chauffeurs no longer support older CPUs without the POPCNT guideline, triggering Windows 10 to blue screen upon rebooting after chauffeur setup.
If you have actually a supported Nvidia GPU however an unsupported CPU, do not set up the most recent Nvidia chauffeurs from Release 555 or onwards. You'll wish to stick to older variations, such as Release 550.
How to inspect if you're impacted
On this assistance page, Nvidia revealed completion of assistance for CPUs without POPCNT (which are technically currently unsupported on Windows 10 and Windows 11) starting with Release 555.
Nvidia likewise supplies guidelines on utilizing Microsoft's totally free Coreinfo tool to examine whether your computer system's CPU supports POPCNT. Here are the actions for your benefit:
- Download Coreinfo from this page.
- Extract the ZIP file, which ought to lead to a folder entitled Coreinfo.
- Right-click on the Coreinfo folder and choose Open in Terminal. This will open PowerShell with the Coreinfo folder as present directory site.
- Type. coreinfo64 -f (consisting of the beginning duration) and press Enter to release the Coreinfo tool.
After validating the license rights, the Coreinfo tool will note out all the information and supported directions of your CPU. This list ought to consist of POPCNT, and it will state Supports POPCNT guideline if your CPU does certainly support POPCNT.
By the method: This issue with POPCNT mainly happens on Windows 10 PCs, however it can Happen on older Windows 11 PCs. Setting Up Windows 11 24H2 without a POPCTN-supporting CPU will trigger comparable concerns.
What is POPCNT, anyhow?
POPCNT debuted in 2008 as part of the Intel's Nehalem architecture, however likewise appeared in modern AMD CPUs at the time.
Brief for Population Count, POPCNT is a direction that tallies up all the “set bits” (with worth 1) in a binary number. It's beneficial for various sort of calculations, consisting of determining parity bits, compression algorithms, and, more just recently, AI-related work.
In Intel's Core processors, the guideline was presented with second-generation Sandy Bridge CPUs, which released in 2011. That's a long time agowhich implies that even if you do not have the current hardware, your CPU most likely supports it.
This post initially appeared on our sis publication PC-WELT and was equated and localized from German.
Author: Hans-Christian Dirscherl, Managing Editor, PC-WELT
Hans-Christian Dirscherl started his IT life with Autoexec.bat and config.sys, Turbo-Pascal and C, Sinix and Wordperfect. He has actually been composing on practically all IT subjects for around 25 years,
