News AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPU Driver Sizes Compared: Who's Most Bloated?

[mtolgae]

If you're on nvidia and don't like bloatware, I definitely recommend using NVCleanstall.

 

[Tac 25]

don't have AMD or Intel, so can't compare. The latest gpu driver from Nvidia is 813 MB in size. Does not really take long to install, only 10-15 minutes, depends on which pc I'm installing it to.

I just chat on forums / discord while waiting for it to finish.

 

[PEnns]

From the earliest days of coding, there were always (and still are) programmers who would need 2-10x more code to perform the same task. Some people code efficiently, many others don't or can't.

But hey, maybe their bosses and fans are happy with bloat

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

They have a good point though. As some others have also pointed out, the majority of the "driver" downloads consist of things other than the actual driver files. While I haven't looked into exactly what's included in recent GPU drivers, much of it probably consists of things like UI graphics, perhaps some sample video files, maybe a bit of audio, and supporting software that includes its own additional baggage. So the actual driver code supporting new features or additional cards likely only makes up a relatively small portion of the overall download. And it might be hard to say exactly what portion, since much of it is likely packaged into the executable files.

And of course, there may be different levels of compression applied to the download package and individual support files within it. Perhaps the Intel download has little compression applied to reduce CPU overhead during installation. Or it might include multiple copies of some files that don't actually get installed on every system.

For a better analysis of how bloated the installations are, it might be better to look at how much space the files take up when added to a fresh install of Windows. And perhaps more importantly, how much RAM each of the drivers consumes when in use. Just because the installation includes over a gigabyte of support files and utilities doesn't mean all those things are going to be loaded into memory when sitting on the desktop or running a game.

You don't think I know all this? That's why he's being ignored. "Hey, let's be pedantic and tell the guy that's been reviewing GPUs for more than a decade what drivers are, in a really insulting way!" While quoting a paragraph where I make a Back to the Future joke, no less! Clearly I'm 100% serious in this article when I link to a Christopher Lloyd clip. 🤔

Look, this was just a short piece noting how large Intel's drivers are in comparison to the others, and also talking about AMD's still bifurcated 7900 and rest-of-GPUs drivers, and in general musing about where things are. Also an observation on how big driver packages have gotten in general. I remember when Nvidia drivers first exceeded 100MB, and that was a big deal. Over 1GB seems almost ludicrous. Obviously not everything is used, but equally obvious I would have hoped is that tossing in stuff that's never used isn't good either. I thought about trying to determine how much space gets occupied after installation as well, but that was more effort than was warranted.

But fundamentally: Bloated software is never good software.

 

[Deleted member 431422]

You don't think I know all this? That's why he's being ignored. "Hey, let's be pedantic and tell the guy that's been reviewing GPUs for more than a decade what drivers are, in a really insulting way!" While quoting a paragraph where I make a Back to the Future joke, no less! Clearly I'm 100% serious in this article when I link to a Christopher Lloyd clip. 🤔

Look, this was just a short piece noting how large Intel's drivers are in comparison to the others, and also talking about AMD's still bifurcated 7900 and rest-of-GPUs drivers, and in general musing about where things are. Also an observation on how big driver packages have gotten in general. I remember when Nvidia drivers first exceeded 100MB, and that was a big deal. Over 1GB seems almost ludicrous. Obviously not everything is used, but equally obvious I would have hoped is that tossing in stuff that's never used isn't good either. I thought about trying to determine how much space gets occupied after installation as well, but that was more effort than was warranted.

But fundamentally: Bloated software is never good software.

Yeah, Win10 is using links like Linux, but the system counts them as occupied space. Regardless, Adrenalin after installation takes a lot of space. I clean C: by hand occasionally and it pains to have hundreds of megabytes occupied by it.

 

[Deleted member 431422]

There are "minimal" and "driver only" install options when installing AMD graphics drivers, is that what you're looking for? I haven't actually checked exactly what gets installed with each option though, or how much space each uses. I'm also fairly confident you can install just the necessary driver files by downloading the package from AMD, extracting it, and then updating your display adapter driver via Device Manager and choosing the extracted files as location of the driver to be installed.

Might try and see what it installs.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Do driver only for sure

 

[TerryLaze]

Over 1GB seems almost ludicrous. Obviously not everything is used, but equally obvious I would have hoped is that tossing in stuff that's never used isn't good either. I thought about trying to determine how much space gets occupied after installation as well, but that was more effort than was warranted.

The windows driver store has an exact copy of every driver your system uses so you can use that to easily see how big a driver pack is.

All of the files look like they would be useful to somebody since each one is for a specific thing the card can do, not every file will be useful to everybody but if one coder of one game used one of the features then you need to have the file for the game/app to properly work.