Whew, well it finally happened, I hopped on the computer this morning to check the never ending work emails and discovered that the Windows Update icon was up. I thought “could it be service pack 1?”. Double clicked the icon and BOOM! There it was SP1 in all its glory was ready to start downloading. At first I had some doubts after reading about some peoples horror stories with the SP1 RC that dropped about a month ago, but I though “eh, Microsoft should have all the kinks worked out”. Looks like they did after about a 20 min download and install period Vista popped back up and ran better than ever. No system hangs, no copy file hangs, nothing. All of the problems that I was having are now non-existent. All thats fine and dandy but I still needed to try out some of the games and see if there was any performance increases or decreases. More after the break.
First up was Crysis. I popped the DVD in the drive and away I went, past the damn EA logo that you cant skip, /pout, then clicked past all of the other videos. Up came the menu and I loaded the last game that i had. Loading screen………… BAM!! here comes the action. Before SP1 I was running Crysis at 1680 x 1050 at medium settings across the board at about a steady 25-35fps range. I was amazed to find that I had actually gained about 3-5fps, all at the same settings. I know it doesn’t sound like much but to have such an improvement in such a demanding game surprises the crap out of me. /cheer
After prying myself away from the Korean alien nano-suit action I pugged in some good old Unreal Tournament 3. On a side note, if you haven’t picked up this game yet go out today and buy it right now. Out of all the FPS games there is still nothing as good as running into a room full of n00bs and pwning all of them with the Rocket Launcher, ahhh. Any who, my rig can usually run this at a stead 40-50 fps range, depending on what level I am playing on and if I have any bots playing or if I’m in a multi-player match. I do run this game at 1920 x 1200 with all the settings in game maxed. There was a slight increase in the fps, just about the same as there was with Crysis, about 3-5fps. I was again happy to see this increase in performance.
In conclusion, I am over all pleased with the performance that came with the new service pack. Its good to know that Microsoft is starting to get there stuff together and make this operating system worthy of competing with its big brother XP. Also I just want to remind everyone that although Vista still has a ways to go, when XP came out back in 2000 everyone was saying the same negative things about it as they are about Vista. Time will always tell but I think that everything is going as Microsoft planned it. Regardless of what all the fan boys say.
Keep your eyes peeled in the next couple of days. I’ll be posting some graphs and benchmark results of Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis. Until next time Happy Gaming!
