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Why are Realtek drivers 900 MB big? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by hardypart@feddit.de to c/technology

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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?

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[–] SoftestVoid 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] hardypart@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I usually download them from the Dell website for my work in IT support. It doesn't really play a role for which model. Here's an example:

Direct link to driver

[–] drwho 3 points 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.

[–] drwho 1 points 1 year ago

The ones on Realtek's site are absurdly tiny by today's standards (which probably means they're somewhat sensible and decently engineered): https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/pc-audio-codecs-high-definition-audio-codecs-software