Nvidia’s best graphics cards are often paired with expensive CPUs, but what if you want to try a completely mismatched, retro configuration? Well, that used to be impossible due to driver issues. But, for whatever reason, Nvidia has just removed the instruction that prevented you from doing so, opening the door to some fun, albeit nonsensical, CPU and GPU combinations.
The instruction in question is called POPCNT (Population Count), and this is a CPU instruction that also prevents Windows 11 from being installed on older hardware. Its job is counting how many bits are present in a binary number. However, as spotted by TheBobPony on X (Twitter), POPCNT will not be a problem for Nvidia’s latest graphics cards anymore.
Looking back at the specs of these CPUs makes me nostalgic. The Intel Core 2 Duo was built on a 65nm (and later 45nm) process node and offered two cores and two threads; a far cry from the CPUs we see today. It had 2MB to 6MB of shared L2 cache and maximum clock speeds ranging from 800MHz to 1,333MHz. Not much to write home about.
And yet, if you for some reason feel compelled to, you can now pair one with an Nvidia RTX 5090, all thanks to this new driver update.
With the removal of POPCNT, you can use Nvidia’s latest graphics with just about any CPU. Previously, trying to do so would’ve caused what TheBobPony refers to as a “soft brick,” meaning your PC would get stuck in a boot loop until it finally got rid of the driver that made it crash and launched Windows Recovery mode.
Realistically, no one’s going to buy an RTX 50-series (or even an RTX 20-series) GPU to pair with a CPU that’s nearly 20 years old, but it’s pretty cool that that’s now a possibility. I would like to see how such a PC would perform. CPU bottleneck, anyone?
