The latest Nvidia driver lets you run ancient CPUs in Windows again without crashing

Ever wanted to run an old Intel Core 2 Duo alongside an RTX 50-series graphics card using Windows 10 as your OS? No, me neither. And if you did, well, as of last year you couldn't… but now you can. You're welcome.

That's according to X user TheBobPony, who says the latest Nvidia drivers (576.40) no longer require the PopCnt CPU instruction. This instruction is one that CPUs in the early and mid 2000's and earlier lacked, but since then all have included it and it's even become a requirement to run Windows 11 from version 24H2 onward.