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And the Redmond company has done little not to invite the operating system measuring contest that throws Vista and XP together in the performance arena. After the tests performed by the Devil Mountain Software company involving beta releases of Vista SP1 and XP SP3, another unofficial benchmark is available carried out between Vista SP1 RC Refresh and Windows XP SP2.

The machines used for the testing featured a Core 2 Duo E6600 3.2GHz (8*400), Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3, 8GB DDR2-800 4-5-4-15, GeForce 8800GT 512MB (stock), Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB <--- Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1 and Samsung SpinPoint T166 320GB <--- Windows XP Professional SP2. The catch is of course that while the version of XP SP2 is not mentioned, it could very well be a 32-bit edition. The tests however have failed to look at the performance of Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3, and as such, it is impossible to tell if there has been any improvement in the first service pack for Vista since the comparison performed by Devil Mountain Software.

While the benchmark is not only unofficial but also rather unprofessional, it does offer a perspective into the performance gains of Vista SP1 in comparison to XP SP3. And with SP1, Microsoft is indeed evolving Vista RTM when it comes down to performance. It is clear that the Redmond company will release an official benchmarking of Vista SP1, XP SP2 and even XP SP3 after the two service packs, currently under development, will be finalized. Until then, all you can get is a taste of what Vista SP1 and XP SP3 can bring to the table. Just keep in mind, that the Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 comparison does, by no means, offer an accurate assessment of the performance of the two service packs, but rather a simple indication about the improvements Microsoft has integrated in the refreshes.

"It's interesting to see that Vista's performance seems to have progressed since it was released. The general usage tests are either faster or equal to XP. It should be noted that the program load times may be influenced slightly by the fact that the OSs reside on different drives (Samsung/WD). However, Vista is on the slower drive (the WD), so it only makes the results even more impressive. Talking about the program load times, it's obvious that Vista's SuperFetch feature works wonderfully. Even though I've only launched Photoshop and OpenOffice a few times, Vista has already picked this up and loads them into mem right after boot up. Crysis was almost certainly not cached into RAM during the test, but still loaded faster than in XP," wrote the author of the test.