I’ve been wondering this for years. I remember some years ago I was wondering why in the world an audio driver needs to be 500 MB big. Now we’re almost at 1 GB.

What gives?

  • Björn TantauEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    WTF

    For comparison, the whole Linux kernel source code that contains every driver for every piece of supported hardware, including stuff from Realtek, is just 213 MB.

  • The DoctorEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    Edit: I hit “post” instead of toggling preview mode off. Still getting used to this site.

    You didn’t say specifically which Realtek drivers you were talking about, so I took a peek at the contents of the .zip archive here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19336/realtek-high-definition-audio-driver-for-windows-10-windows-11-for-intel-nuc8i7be-nuc8i5be-nuc8i3be-products.html

    (unzip -l Audio-Win10_Win11-6.0.9360.1.zip | grep -v '^Archive' | grep -v '^ Length' | grep -v '^----' | sort -b -k1 -n | less, if anybody’s interested)

    The byte hogs appear to be the IntelSSTPreprocStreamer.dll files which, and I’ve no idea, are gargantuan. Almost 75 megs each. There are lots of other files that I doubt anybody but two engineers who haven’t been on vacation in thirty years know the purpose of. Lots of what look like localization files.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is, “what” is pretty easy to answer. “Why,” on the other hand… your guess is as good as mine. Ring up Richard C. Hoagland or something, because anybody’s guess is just as good as anybody else’s.

  • @infinitevalenceEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    You can always download the package and just extract the driver and skip installing the whole software package.

    Or… Switch to Linux.

  • PapamousseEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Look for them on https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Home.aspx in the search box using the ID string like (example) you find in the driver details

    PCI\VEN_1414&DEV_00E0&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_04

    and you will find the latest WHQL drivers, and in general just what’s needed to use your device and not all kind of bloatware/software that you’ll never use.

    • @hardypart@feddit.deOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      The big size is not really a problem. I’m just wondering why it’s like that.

      Thanks anyway :)

  • @SoftestVoid@beehaw.orgEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Do you have a link to the driver? I can’t see one that big on the Realtek site (but I didn’t look that hard). I found one from Intel that’s 663mb and a Dell one that’s 285mb. Both are still pretty big. I downloaded the Intel one and it looks like there are many different drivers in there, but not 600mb worth, the big parts are part of Intel smart sound technology.

      • The DoctorEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        That is a PKzip-style self extracting archive, so running unzip on it works the way you’d expect. I ran the same string of commands on it that I did on the archive downloaded from Intel, and it looks like NNResources64.dll is the culprit, clocking in at 193 megabytes. The next biggest file in the archive is RTAIODAT.DAT, which weighs in at a comparatively svelte 55 megs.

        I have no idea why they need to be that big. It makes no sense to me.