Topic 'Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?' in forum 'Rants, Raves, and Praise' - dslreports.com

Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:41:01 EDT

CylonRed posted : I have a higher end nVidia card (670) and they bundle - the driver packs are not different except for the actual driver files.
--
Brian

"It drops into your stomach like a Abrams's tank.... driven by Rosanne Barr..." A. Bourdain

Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:18:56 EDT

Xioden posted : All but about 15-20MB is drivers.

Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:56:46 EDT

michieru posted : I feel ya on the Nvidia drivers and although they bundle I don't think they do for the higher end cards but it will be nice to know the real size of those drivers excluding the programs that come with them.

Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:51:03 EDT

CylonRed posted : and they had 1/100th of the functionality

Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 18:57:32 EDT

J E F F posted : Remember the days when you could have a word processor (that had hyphenations, justification, spell check, etc) and spread sheet program and the program size of both was under 3 MB?
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Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:20:00 EDT

Xioden posted :

said by Oedipus:

Nvidia/AMD also bundle software (ie, Catalyst Control Center) but their driver downloads are packaged to work with a wide variety of cards. I would imagine that adds to the bulk as well.

NVIDIA drivers are the size they are because they need to be that size. The only thing that arguably isn't a driver, despite it's uses is the control panel, which is 15-20MB. The next big thing is the 64/32bit stuff, that's about 15MB or so of almost identical files. The biggest portion of the driver package by far goes to PhysX, which is 50MB+ due to the way PhysX was implemented by AGEIA, which requires all the old versions to be included for them to continue working in those games.

This is all compressed mind you, so the actual installed size of that ~170MB package is probably around 250MB. Other than a few basic display drivers (<25MB) that run at all times, most of it actually isn't being used at any given time.

Re: [RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 12:06:47 EDT

Oedipus posted : HP's large downloads are the drivers plus a bunch of other crappy software. Many of HP's more professionally-inclined printers do offer a simple "drivers only" download, and they are the size you would expect.

Nvidia/AMD also bundle software (ie, Catalyst Control Center) but their driver downloads are packaged to work with a wide variety of cards. I would imagine that adds to the bulk as well.

[RANT] Driver Download Sizes. Why are they so huge!?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:42:36 EDT

trparky posted : Why do driver download packs have to be so huge?

Case in point...
* nVidia drivers: 169.42 MBs
* HP Printer Drivers: Roughly 250 MBs

No wonder why we need a quad-core and 6 GBs of RAM to run our shit! The drivers are so freakin' huge that they take up nearly a third of the system resources!
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Tom
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