Intel cuts Arc drives to half the size

The launch of Intel’s Arc “Alchemist” graphics card project was nothing but a layer of roses, with severe lag and slow performance being the rule rather than the exception. The company’s drivers and ambitious promises take much of the blame for the less-than-successful launch, but months of tweaking have seen performance and features improve significantly—while graphics card prices drop.

now Draws attention to Tom’s Hardware The pricing and performance of the Arc family aren’t the only things that have moved in the right direction, the size of the company’s graphics card drivers also applies. Since January, the size of the drivers has halved, today weighing in at just over 600MB. Combined with measurable improvements in tests and games, it can therefore be taken as a sign that Intel is working on several fronts to rank up the drivers.

When the entry-level Arc A380 launched last August, it came with an 844MB drive, which is big but still in the same range as drivers from Nvidia and AMD. However, with the introduction of the Arc A770 and A750, the size increased to 1.4GB, and as of early 2023, a whopping 1.2GB of storage was still needed.

Good things come in small packages – specifically the Intel Arc graphics driver package. The latest version of the driver punches above its weight, now down to 604MB from nearly twice that when Intel Arc desktop GPUs launched in October. Our engineers put the old 1.3GB driver download on a diet using smarter compression algorithms. This means faster updates so you can launch your game faster with less bandwidth consumption, all without any performance or feature compromises made. – Intel

However, the fact that the size has now been cut in half is not only evidence that Intel is working on it, but also that the software wasn’t well polished at launch. on Blog page signed by Intel Arc It states that “better compression algorithms” are behind the slimming down, but Tom’s Hardware notes that smaller DLLs and a cleaner installer both play a role. The future will determine if Intel will be able to hold its weight when adding more functionality, game tweaks, and graphics cards.