The day after NVIDIA dropped 182.06 GeForce drivers to coincide with the launch of FEAR 2. An interesting question was raised “Why are NVIDIA’s drivers so big?” “What’s in a 100MB GeForce Windows Vista 64 drivers?”

[…]Anyone who has seen Vista 64 structure, has seen a number of seemingly redundant applications and libraries. Because Vista 64 needs both 64bit and 32bit versions of most libraries to run native 64bit and 32bit apps through WoW64. This kind of redundancy sneaks in to video drivers too due to the way the OS is structured. That’s why Vista 64 driver is 18MB larger than Vista 32 due to a separate need of 64bit OpenGL driver (nvoglv64), 64bit Direct3D driver (nvd3dumx), and finally due to general binary bloat (64bit binaries are slightly larger due to the larger instructions).[…]

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