Windows crash-loops with Nvidia’s new drivers. Here’s how to avoid it

Nvidia has confirmed that new graphics card drivers will cause blue screen crash loops on Windows 10 PCs that can’t execute a certain CPU instruction called POPCNT (Population Count).

Specifically, older Windows 10 computers with CPUs that can’t handle the POPCNT instruction will crash during Windows bootup if installed with Nvidia’s graphics drivers from Release 555 (June 2024) or later.

Starting with Release 555, Nvidia’s drivers no longer support older CPUs without the POPCNT instruction, causing Windows 10 to blue screen upon restarting after driver installation.

If you have a supported Nvidia GPU but an unsupported CPU, do not install the latest Nvidia drivers from Release 555 or onwards. You’ll want to stick with older versions, such as Release 550.

How to check if you’re affected

On this support page, Nvidia announced the end of support for CPUs without POPCNT (which are technically already unsupported on Windows 10 and Windows 11) beginning with Release 555.

Nvidia also provides instructions on using Microsoft’s free Coreinfo tool to check whether your computer’s CPU supports POPCNT. Here are the steps for your convenience:

1. Download Coreinfo from this page.
2. Extract the ZIP file, which should result in a folder titled Coreinfo.
3. Right-click on the Coreinfo folder and select Open in Terminal. This will open PowerShell with the Coreinfo folder as current directory.
4. Type .\coreinfo64 -f (including the starting period) and press Enter to launch the Coreinfo tool.

After confirming the license rights, the Coreinfo tool will list out all the details and supported instructions of your CPU. This list should include POPCNT, and it will say Supports POPCNT instruction if your CPU does indeed support POPCNT.

What is POPCNT, anyway?

POPCNT debuted in 2008 as part of the Intel’s Nehalem architecture, but also appeared in contemporary AMD CPUs at the time.

Short for Population Count, POPCNT is an instruction that tallies up all the “set bits” (with value 1) in a binary number. It’s useful for different kinds of computations, including calculating parity bits, compression algorithms, and, more recently, AI-related work.

In Intel’s Core processors, the instruction was introduced with second-generation Sandy Bridge CPUs, which launched in 2011. That’s a very long time ago, which means that even if you don’t have the latest hardware, your CPU probably supports it.