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.

Because they can’t make it any smaller without removing the ridiculous amount of bugs they are known for.

WTF

For comparison, the whole Linux kernel source code that contains every driver for every piece of supported hardware, including stuff from Realtek, is just 213 MB.

You can always download the package and just extract the driver and skip installing the whole software package.

Or… Switch to Linux.

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.