Drivers are an integral part of the best graphics cards — without them, you only get baseline functionality, with no fancy 3D graphics, video encoding or decoding, upscaling, or all the other things we've come to expect. We compared driver download sizes for the latest GPUs in late January and found that Intel was strangely bloated. We must have caught someone's attention, as the latest 4255 drivers, which are also WHQL certified, are about half the size of January's 4090 beta drivers.
We mused at the time that maybe Intel was including some unneeded cruft, or maybe it just wasn't compressing things as much as it could. Whatever the case, there's been remarkable progress in just two months. I've got a collection of just about every Intel Arc driver release since launch. Here are the exact sizes of the downloads (which doesn't necessarily equate to uncompressed install size, but it's far easier to check), release dates, and other details.
There are a few things worth pointing out, like the jump in size when Intel went from just supporting the A380 (and various existing integrated graphics solutions) to the official Arc launch drivers. Why the extra 500+ MB? Part of it was merging the Arc Control Center into the main driver download, and there were bug fixes and other factors that likely played a role. Later in October, the size dropped by about 170 MB.
From then until February, the size of Intel's Arc drivers remained pretty consistent at around 1.2 GB. Note that late January was when we wrote the piece about how bloated Intel's drivers seemed to be compared to AMD and Nvidia. By March, the first driver release that month had lopped off about 100MB in size for the Raptor Lake-U laptop launch.
The next day, a different driver came out, reducing the size by 186MB, but that was only the beginning. The current 4255 drivers that came out last night dropped another 284MB in girth. The running total of weight loss since October is at 761MB, making Arc a serious contender for the Biggest Loser: they're 44% of the drivers they once were! While we're not entirely sure about all of the details, Intel's driver blog states has this to say:
"Good things come in small packages — the Intel Arc graphics driver package, specifically. This latest driver release punches above its weight, now down to 604 megabytes from nearly double that when the Intel Arc desktop GPUs launch 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 On even sooner with less bandwidth consumed, all with zero compromises in performance or features made."
I've provided a more detailed analysis of what's happened with the old versus new drivers in this forum post. Intel mentions a compression algorithm change (it looks like it went from from Zip to 7-zip), but that alone isn't enough to get the 50% reduction. 7-zip probably gets 10–20 percent higher compression, but there are two other major differences.
First, the old drivers packaged the full "Intel Driver and Support Assistant Installer" (around 229MiB), while the new drivers use a smaller version that likely downloads and installs additional stuff (it's 42.7MiB now). The second big difference is that eight DLLs (igd11dxva32.dll, igd11dxva64.dll, igd12dxva32.dll, igd12dxva64.dll, igd9dxva32.dll, igd9dxva64.dll, igvkMedia32.dll, and igvkMedia64.dll) in the old drivers are about 36.6MiB smaller. That data appears to be repeated content that is instead moved into two new DLLs (media_bin_32.dll and media_bin_64.dll) that are each around 29.3MiB in size.
Overall, the file format changes appear to have reduced the driver size by 420MiB, and the new compression algorithm upgrade gets somewhere around a 3.16-to-1 compression ratio, compared to a 2.0-to-1 compression ratio before. Regardless, smaller downloads are a good thing for anyone with a data cap. Says the guy who downloaded over 300GB of Large Language Models while poking around at chatbots last week.
