Drivers are an integral part of the best graphics cards. Without drivers, you only get basic functionality and not fancy 3D graphics, video encoding or decoding, upscaling, or all the other features you might expect. Comparing the driver download sizes for the latest GPUs in late January, I found Intel to be strangely bloated. We must have caught someone’s attention. Latest 4255 driver (opens in new tab)It is also WHQL certified and is about half the size of the January 4090 beta driver.
At the time, I wondered if Intel had included stuff they didn’t need, or if they had compressed it as little as possible. In any case, in just two months we have made remarkable progress. I have a collection of almost every Intel Arc driver release since launch. Here are the exact size of the download (which doesn’t necessarily match the uncompressed install size, but it’s much easier to check), release date, and other details.
| version | size | release date | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3259 | 844MB | August 4, 2022 | First widely available A380 driver |
| 3268 | 846 megabytes | August 22, 2022 | A380 Spider-Man Beta Driver |
| 3490 | 1,365 megabytes | October 11, 2022 | Arc A770/A750 Launch Driver |
| 3491 | 1,365 megabytes | October 17, 2022 | Beta Game On drivers for 4 new games |
| 3793 | 1,197 megabytes | October 27, 2022 | Beta Game On drivers for 3 new games |
| 3802 | 1,197 megabytes | November 18, 2022 | Game on drivers for 4 new games, performance optimizations for 8 other games |
| 3959 | 1,210MB | December 8, 2022 | Game On drivers for 5 new games, DX9 major overhaul |
| 3975 | 1,211 megabytes | December 13, 2022 | Beta Game On drivers for 3 new games, DirectStorage support |
| 4032 | 1,214MB | January 3, 2023 | Boot driver for Raptor Lake-S (UHD Graphics 730) |
| 4090 | 1,237 megabytes | January 24, 2023 | Beta Game On drivers for two new games |
| 4091 | 1,175 megabytes | February 1, 2023 | Launched drivers for Raptor Lake-P mobile CPUs and introduced desktop Arc Control mode |
| 4123 | 1,175 megabytes | February 7, 2023 | Beta Game On drivers for two new games |
| 4125 | 1,175 megabytes | February 16, 2023 | Beta Game On drivers for 5 new games |
| 4146 | 1,074 megabytes | March 15, 2023 | Game On for two new games, Raptor Lake-U boot drivers |
| 4148 | 888MB | March 16, 2023 | Beta Game On drivers for two new games |
| 4255 | 604MB | March 23, 2023 | RE4 Remake’s Game On, performance optimizations and massive size reduction |
There are a few things worth pointing out, such as Intel’s support for the A380 (and various existing integrated graphics solutions), as well as the size jump when moving to the official Arc boot drivers. Why the extra 500+ MB? Not sure, but many bugfixes and other factors probably contributed. In late October, the size decreased by about 170MB.
From then until February, the size of Intel’s Arc driver remained almost constant at 1.2 GB. Note that he wrote an article in late January about how the bloated Intel driver looked compared to AMD and his Nvidia. By March, the first driver for his release that month was reduced in size by about 100MB to match the launch of Raptor Lake-U laptops.
The next day another driver came out and reduced the size by 186MB, but that was just the beginning. His current 4255 driver, which was announced last night, also dropped him 284MB. Cumulative weight loss since October is his 761MB, making Arc a serious Biggest Loser contender. That’s his 44% of the previous drivers!I’m not entirely sure about all the details, but State of Intel’s Driver Blog (opens in new tab) This should say:
“Good things come in small packages, specifically the Intel Arc graphics driver package. Decreased from 2x to 604 megabytes, our engineers download 1.3 GB drivers while dieting using old smarter compression algorithms, this means faster updates, so performance You can start gaming faster with less bandwidth consumption, without compromising on performance or features.”
I doubt the compression algorithm was the only real change. Did you have a lot of TIF or BMP files that were converted to PNG? Because a moderately compressed starting point archive size isn’t usually reduced by 56%. In any case, the smaller download size is a good thing for those with data caps. Says the man who downloaded over 300GB of large language models last week while tinkering with chatbots.
