Windows Vista SP1 Gaming Performance

Conclusions

So, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is here and the results kind of speak for themselves. In some scenarios, there are performance improvements, but in others there is actually a performance drop – that’s something we weren’t expecting to see to be honest.

At the very least, we were hoping that Service Pack 1 would build upon the foundations laid by the five hotfixes that helped to fix the vast majority of performance-related problems in games – in some situations though, this sadly doesn’t appear to be the case.

What’s interesting though is that the performance patterns were not consistent across both the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 and the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2. Typically, when one saw increased performance, the other saw performance drops.

The one game where we saw a pattern was Crysis and thankfully that was an upwards trend. I’m sure that this will be good news for anyone still playing the game or wanting to eke more performance out of their hardware at the same settings. That said, the GeForce 9800 GX2 suffered some minor drops in minimum frame rates when anti-aliasing was disabled, but generally speaking this won’t affect your gaming experience massively.

Call of Duty 4 disappointed on the 3870 X2, where performance actually dropped by around five percent with anti-aliasing enabled. However, the same wasn’t true for the GeForce 9800 GX2, which saw notable increases in minimum frame rate when AA was applied; average frame rates also increased a little as well.


World in Conflict saw a much-needed performance improvement for the Radeon HD 3870 X2, but we still suffered some strange performance characteristics at 1680x1050 2xAA. The game is playable at 1920x1200 0xAA 16xAF with very high details and performance is adequate with 2xAA applied at the same resolution. On the other hand, the GeForce 9800 GX2 saw a drop in performance of around four to eight percent, depending on the resolution.

BioShock showed respectable increases on both the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and the GeForce 9800 GX2, although it was the former that saw the biggest improvements in gameplay experience. The minimum frame rates increased significantly and the difference in overall gameplay experience was notable.

Supreme Commander and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars didn’t really see any performance improvements, but then at the same time neither really saw a performance drop either. Oblivion on the other hand, showed some respectable performance increases on the Radeon HD 3870 X2 in all scenarios but 2560x1600 0xAA 16xAF, where we saw a slight drop in average frame rate – it wasn’t enough to be a cause for concern though. On the other hand, the GeForce 9800 GX2 didn’t really see any notable benefits or drawbacks to installing the Service Pack.

Final Thoughts…

On the whole then, the benefits of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 from a gamers’ perspective are quite small at the moment – you should see similar performance to what you’re getting with an up-to-date vanilla Vista installation with all of the latest hotfixes applied. That’s a good thing in many respects, but it won’t fulfil the hopes of the Service Pack magically increasing gaming performance for gamers.

It does add quite a few new features though and if you’re stuck deciding between installing it and not, we recommend going through the change log to see if any of the changes are useful to you. Of course, there is another side to the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 coin—2D application performance—and that’s something we’re going to be investigating later this week.