With both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3 nearing completion and already delivered to select experts, it is about time we see some benchmarking scores and comparisons.
The research staff at exo-blog benchmarked both service packs and while they were disappointed with the much anticipated Vista SP1, they were pleasantly surprised with XP SP3's unexpected performance gains.
The team benchmarked Windows Vista RTM (with no updates) against a fully updated Windows Vista SP1 version. Both versions performed identically in all tests except 2 where SP1 performed 1% faster in one and 2% in the other.
"Bottom Line: If you've been disappointed with the performance of Windows Vista to date, get used to it. SP1 is simply not the panacea that many predicted", the research staff concluded. "In the end, it's Vista's architecture - not a lack of tuning or bug fixes - that makes it perform so poorly on systems that were "barn-burners" under Windows XP."
On the other hand, benchmarking Windows XP SP2 against SP3 showed an unexpected 10% performance gain. Both XP versions performed more than 100% better than Windows Vista for the same tasks on the same hardware.