Nvidia just caused the 'blue screen of death' error for Windows

About a month ago, Nvidia stopped supporting drivers on older computers that do not have the POPCNT (population count) command set.

Installing version 555 of the POPCNT driver or later on supported Nvidia GPUs and unsupported processors causes the entire system to crash and cause the blue screen of death error. The blue screen error code this time is determined to be SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED.

To prevent the operating system from automatically downloading POPCNT driver version 555 or later, Windows 10 users with systems using older processors with still supported graphics cards (such as GTX 750 Ti or later) Windows Update settings may need to be adjusted.

Currently, the number of Windows users running systems with Core 2 Duo CPUs combined with graphics cards still supported by Nvidia is quite small, so the above blue screen of death problem will be limited to a small number of users.

But if you are still using the old pre-SSE4.2 system with GTX 750 Ti or GTX 950 and cannot boot after updating the graphics driver, now you know the reason.

Jessica Tanner

Update 06 August 2024