Just a week ago, Microsoft released the long-awaited first Service Pack for Windows Vista and, as a result of its release, we felt it was right to move all of our test systems to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as soon as possible. There will be a few reviews published during the transition period that don’t use Windows Vista SP1, but starting from this week you will start to see our first hardware reviews using the new Service Pack.
Today, Nvidia has released a driver that enables Quad SLI support on the GeForce 9800 GX2 – something that we’d normally be interested in covering the moment it launches. However, because of the arrival of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, there’s the big question of performance surrounding it.
We also decided that, with the many man hours of benchmarks required for a full-blown GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI evaluation, it was highly unlikely that we were going to deliver the article we felt both Quad SLI and AMD’s recently-released CrossFire X solutions really deserved. As a result of this, we’ll be focusing today’s article on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 gaming performance—and not on the latest crop of Quad GPU behemoths that very few gamers honestly sink money into.
We have tested our systems with all of the pre-SP1 updates installed—including the five hotfixes recommended for optimal performance in today’s latest games—and then again after installing Service Pack 1, to get an idea of the benefits of moving to SP1 from a gamers’ perspective. After all, many of you said that you wouldn’t upgrade to Windows Vista until after the first Service Pack was released, so today we’ll find out whether it was worth waiting for…
Of course, 3D application performance isn’t the only thing to consider with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, as there are said to be improvements in 2D application performance as well. For those eagerly waiting for 2D application performance benchmarks with SP1, this will follow in another article later this week – for now, the focus is on Windows Vista SP1 gaming performance. But before we get onto performance though, we’ll make some brief notes about the installation process.
Installation
First of all, there are different ways to install Windows Vista Service Pack 1: you can either get hold of it via Windows Update—the method that Microsoft recommends for installation on single systems—or you can alternatively download the standalone packages from the Microsoft Download Center if you’re installing the update on multiple machines.
We installed the update on three systems in total—two test machines and my office workstation—and each took different amounts of time to install. Despite all three systems being fairly highly specced, the fastest machine was the one that took the longest time to update: my dual quad-core Intel Xeon workstation. On this machine, the process took about 40 minutes to complete (not including the download time), while the two test systems ran through the entire procedure in around 25 to 30 minutes.
Installation (continued)
Microsoft said that the update would require several reboots and as you’re working your way through the installation wizard, there’s an option to allow automatic rebooting – we enabled this on all three systems that we updated and, in all cases, we counted a total of three reboots during the installation process.
The updates themselves weigh in at 434.5MB for the 32-bit version and 726.5MB for the 64-bit version if you download the standalone packages. All three of the systems updated for the purposes of this article use the 64-bit version of Windows Vista—probably the most popular version with bit-tech readers.
Because we're deploying the update across our office network and test systems, we opted for the latter method on our two test beds, while the third—my office PC—was updated via Windows Update.
For those wondering what has changed in Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft has documented everything in a 17-page change log that outlines the finer details of the new OS. The list of improvements includes support for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) on 64-bit versions of the OS, DirectX 10.1, and exFAT – a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
Of course, this small list doesn’t take up all 17 pages of the document and there are many more improvements and fixes included in the update. However, I'll save you from a massive list and let you go and read them if you're especially interested in the finer details of the Service Pack.
How we tested
As always, we did our best to deliver a clean set of benchmarks, with each test repeated three times and an average of those results is what we’re reporting here. In the rare case where performance was inconsistent, we continued repeating the test until we got three results that were consistent.
The two systems were first configured without Service Pack 1 installed, but with all of the latest updates installed via Windows Update. We also installed the five Windows Vista hotfixes that help to improve performance in both single and multi-GPU systems: KB936710, KB938194, KB938979, KB940105 and KB945149. Once the benchmarking had been completed on the systems in this state, we then updated to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and re-ran all of our tests again.
Nvidia Test System
- XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 600M 1GB - operating at 600/1,500/2,000MHz using Forceware 174.53 beta
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (operating at 3.00GHz – 9x333MHz); XFX nForce 780i SLI motherboard (nForce 780i SLI); 2x 2GB Corsair XMS2-6400C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 5-5-5-12-1T); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000W PSU; Windows Vista Ultimate x86-64; Nvidia nForce 9.46 WHQL.
ATI Test System
- ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB - operating at 825/1,800MHz using Catalyst 8.3 WHQL
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (operating at 3.00GHz – 9x333MHz); Asus Maximus Formula motherboard (Intel X38 Express); 2x 2GB Corsair XMS2-6400C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 5-5-5-12-1T); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000W PSU; Windows Vista Ultimate x86-64; Intel inf 8.3.0 WHQL.
Games Tested
We used the following versions of the games listed to evaluate the performance of these video cards:
- Crysis, version 1.2 (64-bit) with DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare version 1.5 with DirectX 9.0
- World in Conflict, version 1.007 with DirectX 10
- BioShock, version 1.1 with DirectX 10
- Supreme Commander, version 3280 with DirectX 9.0
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, version 1.2 with DirectX 9.0
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, version 1.4.0
Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 25th March 2008
To be continued...
www.vista123.net, tweak and customize Windows Vista easily.
