Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista couldn’t have arrived soon enough; this is only exacerbated after I realised that the “Hotfixes and Security Updates” document was 77 pages long. Microsoft generalises these improvements in its “Overview of Windows Vista Service Pack 1” document which details several sections under the broad compass of compatibility, reliability, security and performance.
So while it’s always worth installing the Service Pack for these other parts—especially security and reliability—but what cost or leverage do these other fixes have on performance?
Yesterday, we evaluated Windows Vista Service Pack 1 gaming performance and found that the improvements were small at best. In fact, in some cases, we found that performance was actually lower—by up to 10 percent—and that’s not good news for anyone that was waiting for “magical” improvements in Vista gaming performance.
Today we are focusing our efforts on core application performance because, according to Microsoft, it has worked on and improved the performance in many areas:
- Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares consume significant bandwidth and not perform as quickly as expected.
- Improves the performance of copying files. In internal tests, copying files from one folder to another on the same local disk was 25 percent faster. Copying files from a remote computer that was not running Windows Vista SP1 was 45 percent faster. Because of networking improvements in SP1, copying files from a remote computer that was also running Windows Vista SP1 was as much as 50 percent faster.
- Improves the progress estimation when copying files by using Windows Explorer so that the time estimate in the progress window appears within two seconds.
- Improves the speed of adding files to and extracting files from compressed folders.
- Improves the performance of power transitions (for example, resuming from hibernation and standby mode).
- Improves the performance of domain-joined computers when operating off the domain. Before Windows Vista SP1, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialogue box.
Other notable improvements to the “Hardware Ecosystem” are:
- Support for UEFI firmware on the 64-bit versions of Vista.
- Adds support for Direct3D 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
- Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
- Adds support for SD Advanced DMA (ADMA) on compliant SD standard host controllers. This new transfer mechanism, which is expected to be supported in SD controllers soon, will improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization.
- Adds support for creating a single DVD media that boots on PCs with either BIOS or EFI.
- Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
- Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center PCs.
- Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.
The relevance is quite significant: DirectX 10.1, UEFI, better DVD, Blu-ray, HD DVD, Digital Tuner and content protection support, as well as Media Center Extenders.
From this alone, the incentive to install it is certainly significant, but how does it compare in the real world? We decided to find out…
Test Setup
- Asus P5K Pro (0904 BIOS)
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, 2.66GHz
- 2GB OCZ Reaper PC-8500 at 800MHz 4-4-4-12-1T
- Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
- 2x Western Digital Raptor 150GB WD1500AHFD (separate drives, non-RAID)
- Plextor PX-708A DVD-RW Drive
- Corsair TW750W PSU
- Icy Box IB-MP303S-B with a Seagate 7200.9 500GB SATA Hard Drive for USB file transfer testing
- Thecus N2100 with a Samsung Spinpoint HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive and CAT5e crossover cable for Network testing.
- Intel Inf 8.3.1.1009 WHQL
- Nvidia Forceware 169.25 WHQL
- Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
We first installed Windows Vista onto a clean drive partition, then the latest hardware drivers were sourced and installed. Finally the system was fully patched (as of 25th March 2008) up to but not including Service Pack 1.
The drives were then cleaned (in the case of file copy testing), defragmented and rebooted between each test run. Each run was also done three times in order to get an accurate average result. After installing SP1 the drives were again defragmented using the Windows defrag utility.
In addition the Vista OS was set up in the same way that we always do in order to minimise the differences between individual test runs: File Indexing and Aero were left on, while ReadyBoost, Superfetch and System Protection were all disabled.
Boot Times
We tested the boot time from AFTER the system had successfully completed its POST procedure because this is independent of the OS booting and we took an average of three runs in succession.
On average, the SP1 machine booted several seconds slower than the non-SP1 machine. There are no extra visible elements in the boot process – it just does slightly more, which ends up making it a bit slower.
Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 26th March 2008
To be continued...
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