Why do drivers keep getting bigger?

[Zapthos_]

I remember back in the Windows 7 days when GPU drivers were like 150mb and audio drivers like 100, now GPU drivers are near 1gb and audio drivers near 500mb. Why do they keep increasing in size

[Radium_Angel]

Telemetry. At least with nVidia's drivers that's the case.

[AlexRomania]

Did you try to install the drivers ? If you not, follow my steps:

Press Windows Button;

Type "Device Manager".

Go To "Display Adapters".

Right click on "Microsoft Basic Adapter" or GPU Name;

Click "Update driver".

And click "Search automatically for drivers" (For reinstall, click to "Browse my computer for drivers".

Let the windows to make his work.


For reinstalling the driver, follow my steps.

 

Press Windows Button;

Type "Device Manager".

Go to "Display Adapters"

Right click to your GPU Driver and click on "Uninstall Driver"

Check the box of "Delete the driver software for this device"

Wait...

Now, go to Display Adapters, if i don't appear, wait 2 - 3 minutes to windows install automatically.
Done !

 

Edit: You can press on your keyboard "CTRL + Windows Button + Shift + B to reset the driver.

[GoodBytes]

23 minutes ago, Zapthos_ said:

I remember back in the Windows 7 days when GPU drivers were like 150mb and audio drivers like 100, now GPU drivers are near 1gb and audio drivers near 500mb. Why do they keep increasing in size

A few reasons.

You have extra software that now comes bundled in, and if they are fancy looking, well, they will consume more resource. 

Aside from this, in the case of Nvidia, Nvidia bundles all its GPU drivers into one package. You can pick any actively supported GPU listed don their site, and you'll get the same driver, and of course, be the the same size as a result. So the drivers increase in capacity for each GPU releases.

[NinJake]

3 minutes ago, AlexRomania said:

-snip-

I don't think this bit is relevant to the discussion as to why drivers are increasing in file size over time.

 

My answer to OP is it's possible there's more parts in hardware that need to be controlled compared to back in the day, however the telemetry portion seems much more likely for a huge increase in file size.

 

The main thing is a driver is instructions on how to complete a task. Whether that task is controlling a plug and play GPS device, sending information to a monitor or dropping marbles, instructions would be needed to replicate an exact function/output consistently every time.

 

If I have a marble and a single track facing downwards, the instructions to get the marble from A to B would be simple.

However if you have multiple lanes and marbles with different mechanisms to move the track/marble, you'll start to get many more instructions required to get the marbles from A to B.