Earlier in the week, we reported on an Nvidia driver change which opened upcrazy new possibilities for PC DIYers. However, the dreams of Intel Core 2 system makers enjoying outlandish high jinks with Nvidia RTX50 GPUs have now partially evaporated. Twitter(X)-based tech enthusiast Bob Pony, who first surfaced the driver change, is back, but his tales of “struggles,” aren’t exactly the news we wanted to hear.
To recap, the latest Nvidia GeForce driver re-enabled support for Intel processors dating back to the Core 2 era, as it no longer required CPU support for the POPCNT instruction. That is all well and good, and Pony took to Twitter yesterday to “happily confirm that it’s possible to use an NVIDIA RTX 50 series graphics card in an old system such as an Intel Core 2 Quad.” Specifically, they partnered their old Core 2 Quad Q9450 with an unashamedly modernRTX 5060 Ti. “It works!” Pony celebrated, and tipped followers to avoid trying the same with anRTX 5060 non-Tidue to its PCIe x8 interface.
What happened next is that Pony quickly went from fiddling around inWindows 11to trying to get some modern games running on their May-to-September combo.
The struggles of using a Core 2 Quad paired with NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti… can’t play majority of games that use ray tracing due to the processor lacking some instruction sets required for the game to run. 🫠 pic.twitter.com/XcwZFxhHXSMay 17, 2025
Things didn’t go great, and a few hours ago, Pony returned to social media with a less chirpy Tweet. Their key finding was that they “can’t play [the] majority of games that use ray tracing due to the processor lacking some instruction sets required for the game to run.” The included screenshot showed evidence ofQuake II RTXfalling on its face.
So,ray traced gamesare out of the question with these lopsided systems, but plenty of others may have decent performance. It would be great if social media communities could start to put together a compatibility list. In the meantime, perhaps we can keep an eye on this social media post.
We might also find that Intel Core 2 system owners are more attracted to older titles, which their previous GPU wasn’t that great at accelerating. If this were the case, an RT gaming roadblock wouldn’t be perceived as a significant loss.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
