Nvidia has confirmed that new graphics card drivers will trigger blue display screen crash loops on Home windows 10 PCs that may’t execute a sure CPU instruction referred to as POPCNT (Inhabitants Rely).
Particularly, older Home windows 10 computer systems with CPUs that may’t deal with the POPCNT instruction will crash throughout Home windows bootup if put in with Nvidia’s graphics drivers from Launch 555 (June 2024) or later.
Beginning with Launch 555, Nvidia’s drivers not assist older CPUs with out the POPCNT instruction, inflicting Home windows 10 to blue display screen upon restarting after driver set up.
You probably have a supported Nvidia GPU however an unsupported CPU, don’t set up the most recent Nvidia drivers from Launch 555 or onwards. You’ll wish to follow older variations, equivalent to Launch 550.
Methods to verify should you’re affected
On this assist web page, Nvidia introduced the top of assist for CPUs with out POPCNT (that are technically already unsupported on Home windows 10 and Home windows 11) starting with Launch 555.
Nvidia additionally gives directions on utilizing Microsoft’s free Coreinfo software to verify whether or not your pc’s CPU helps POPCNT. Listed below are the steps on your comfort:
- Obtain Coreinfo from this web page.
- Extract the ZIP file, which ought to end in a folder titled Coreinfo.
- Proper-click on the Coreinfo folder and choose Open in Terminal. This may open PowerShell with the Coreinfo folder as present listing.
- Kind
.coreinfo64 -f(together with the beginning interval) and press Enter to launch the Coreinfo software.
After confirming the license rights, the Coreinfo software will checklist out all the main points and supported directions of your CPU. This checklist ought to embrace POPCNT, and it’ll say Helps POPCNT instruction in case your CPU does certainly assist POPCNT.
By the way in which: This drawback with POPCNT largely happens on Home windows 10 PCs, nevertheless it can additionally happen on older Home windows 11 PCs. Putting in Home windows 11 24H2 and not using a POPCTN-supporting CPU will trigger comparable points.
What’s POPCNT, anyway?
POPCNT debuted in 2008 as a part of the Intel’s Nehalem structure, but in addition appeared in modern AMD CPUs on the time.
Quick for Inhabitants Rely, POPCNT is an instruction that tallies up all of the “set bits” (with worth 1) in a binary quantity. It’s helpful for various sorts of computations, together with calculating parity bits, compression algorithms, and, extra not too long ago, AI-related work.
In Intel’s Core processors, the instruction was launched with second-generation Sandy Bridge CPUs, which launched in 2011. That’s a very very long time in the past, which implies that even should you don’t have the most recent {hardware}, your CPU most likely helps it.
This text initially appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
