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?

  •  The Doctor   ( @drwho@beehaw.org ) 
    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.