Intel’s Latest GPU Drivers Are Half the Size They Used to Be
Drivers are an essential part of the best graphics cards – without them you only get basic functionality, without fancy 3D graphics, video encoding or decoding, upscaling or all the other things we come to expect. We compared driver download sizes for the latest GPUs in late January and found that Intel was oddly bloated. We must have caught someone’s attention as the latest 4255 drivers (opens in new tab)which are also WHQL certified are about half the size of the January 4090 beta drivers.
We thought at the time that maybe Intel had built in unnecessary stuff or that it just wasn’t compressing as much as it could. Be that as it may, there has been remarkable progress in just two months. I have a collection of almost every Intel Arc driver version since launch. Here are the exact sizes of the downloads (which don’t necessarily match the uncompressed install size, but are much easier to check), release dates, and other details.
| execution | Size | release date | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3259 | 844MB | 08/04/2022 | First generally available A380 drivers |
| 3268 | 846MB | 08/22/2022 | A380 Spider-Man Beta Driver |
| 3490 | 1,365MB | 10/11/2022 | Boot driver for Arc A770/A750 |
| 3491 | 1,365MB | 10/17/2022 | Beta Game-On drivers for four new games |
| 3793 | 1,197MB | 10/27/2022 | Beta Game-On drivers for three new games |
| 3802 | 1,197MB | 11/18/2022 | Game On drivers for four new games, performance optimizations for eight more games |
| 3959 | 1,210MB | 08.12.2022 | Game-on drivers for five new games, major DX9 overhaul |
| 3975 | 1,211MB | 13.12.2022 | Beta Game-On drivers for three new games, DirectStorage support |
| 4032 | 1,214MB | 01/03/2023 | Boot Driver for Raptor Lake-S (UHD Graphics 730) |
| 4090 | 1,237MB | 01/24/2023 | Beta Game-On drivers for two new games |
| 4091 | 1,175MB | 02/01/2023 | Launch driver for Raptor Lake-P mobile CPUs, introduced desktop arc control mode |
| 4123 | 1,175MB | 07.02.2023 | Beta Game-On drivers for two new games |
| 4125 | 1,175MB | 02/16/2023 | Beta Game-On drivers for five new games |
| 4146 | 1,074MB | 03/15/2023 | Game On for two new games, launch driver for Raptor Lake-U |
| 4148 | 888MB | 03/16/2023 | Beta Game-On drivers for two new games |
| 4255 | 604MB | 03/23/2023 | Game On for RE4 Remake, performance optimizations and significant size reduction |
There are a few things worth noting, like the size leap as Intel moved from just supporting the A380 (and various existing integrated graphics solutions) to official Arc-Boot drivers. Why the extra 500+ MB? We’re not sure, but there were a lot of bug fixes and other factors that probably played a role. Later in October, the size dropped by about 170 MB.
From then until February, the size of Intel’s Arc drivers stayed fairly constant at around 1.2GB. Note that we wrote the article at the end of January about how bloated Intel’s drivers seem to be compared to AMD and Nvidia. By March, the first driver release had shrunk about 100MB in size for the launch of the Raptor Lake-U laptop that month.
Another driver came out the next day, reducing the size by 186MB, but that was just the beginning. The current 4255 drivers that came out last night lost another 284MB in size. Total ongoing weight loss since October is 761MB, making Arc a serious contender for Biggest Loser: they’re 44% of the riders they once were! Although we’re not entirely sure of all the details, Intel’s Drivers Blog states (opens in new tab) has this to say:
“Good things come in small packages – especially the Intel Arc graphics driver package. This latest driver version beats its weight, and it’s now down to 604 megabytes, down from nearly double what it was when Intel Arc desktop GPUs launched in October. Our engineers put the old 1.3GB driver download on a diet with smarter compression algorithms. This means faster updates, so you can game even sooner with less bandwidth consumed, all without compromising on performance or features.”
I’m skeptical that the only real change was in the compression algorithms. Was there a bunch of TIF or BMP files converted to PNG? Because you don’t typically get a 56% reduction in archive size for a moderately compressed starting point. Regardless, smaller downloads are a good thing for anyone with a data cap. Says the guy who downloaded over 300GB of large language models last week while poking around in chatbots.