AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPU Driver Sizes Compared: Feature Creep

We now have three major players vying to be the best graphics cards : AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. The two incumbents recently released their next-generation GPU architectures, with Nvidia Ada Lovelace taking on AMD RDNA 3 . The Intel Arc Alchemist architecture also came out last year, but you can certainly make the argument that it was really designed to compete with Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA 2 . Beyond the hardware, though, software and drivers play a critical role in extracting maximum performance from the GPU, and drivers are becoming increasingly complex.

We’ve become accustomed to seeing larger download sizes on Nvidia’s drivers, though they did shrink quite a bit back when Nvidia killed off 3D Vision support (RIP). Besides the drivers, there’s also the included GeForce Experience app — a 124.8 MiB download if you grab it separately, but it’s normally packaged with every Nvidia driver. only have to support two GPUs 8% larger than the drivers that support probably over 100 different GPUs? Maybe the unified AMD drivers won’t be much larger and it’s just a matter of tying a few remaining pieces together. 1.21 GB? (opens in new tab) Great Scott! How could they have been so careless? But seriously, you have to wonder what exactly is taking up so much space. best SSDs have become pretty affordable, as these days you can grab a fast 1TB NVMe drive (opens in new tab) for around $85, or alternatively a 2TB SATA drive (opens in new tab) . Unpacking and installing the drivers will of course consume even more space, but that’s nothing compared to 100GB and larger game install sizes — unless you have a data cap and like to download drivers on a regular basis. Bon appétit!