New tests have revealed that XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1. Vista's first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system's performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Devil Mountain Software the improvement was not overwhelming — leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor.
Vista, both with and without SP1, performed over two times slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds. Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than two percent compared to performance without SP1 — much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent