In a nutshell: Back in January, TechSpot talked about why Intel GPU drivers were about twice as large as AMD and Nvidia, possibly due to less optimization time. Whatever the reason, the new Team Blue rider has lost weight and has become only slightly bigger than Team Red. Nvidia has the biggest load again, which has gotten a little fat lately.
Intel’s latest graphics driver has reduced the download size from 1.6 GB to 604 MB. Optimization brings the novice GPU software closer to its competitors without compromising features or performance.
The company attributes the achievement to improved compression, pointing out that the previous bloat was mainly due to a lack of experience in packaging specialized graphics drivers. Intel seems to be adapting quickly to a market dominated by two competitors who have been doing this for about 20 years.
The huge size of the earlier Team Blue drivers didn’t add up because they had to support a much smaller number of GPU models. Intel has only one generation on the market, while Nvidia and AMD drivers must support multiple generations. Additionally, Nvidia likes to package its GeForce Experience software (which some might consider malware) with its drivers. Intel’s inclusion of integrated graphics drivers also does not explain the discrepancy, since AMD drivers also support iGPU and APU.
All three companies released new drivers this week in preparation for the just-released Resident Evil 4 remake. Nvidia and AMD also highlight The Last of Us Part 1 and the beta version of Diablo IV in their release notes, and Intel released its Diablo IV driver last week. The free open beta version of Diablo IV will last until the end of this weekend, and the first part of The Last of Us, part 1, will be released on PC next week, on Tuesday.
Intel also notes that it is still improving the performance of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Arc GPUs. The most popular game on Steam still uses DirectX 9, which Arc struggled with until recent updates. It’s unclear how the Counter-Strike 2 update changes will affect Arc, but other games using the Source 2 engine have been updated to DirectX 11.
Meanwhile, the new Nvidia drivers, whose volume has increased to almost 900 MB, also support the upcoming experimental ray tracing mode Cyberpunk 2077 “Overdrive”. An additional graphics preset introduces path tracing into the game and is likely to hit GPUs when it arrives on April 11.
