Vista exactly hasn’t been a Hit with the Gamers. System Hog is what it is commonly referred to by many. We reported sometime back that Vista has released a few updates to fix the Gaming issues. The fixes particularly did not help much though.
Windows Vista is soon going to see the release of much awaited Service Pack 1 (SP1) and it aims to improve the Gaming performance a lot. Here is what the official statement to Firing Squad reads:
As for gaming specifically: gaming performance is strongly influenced by video drivers and we’ve seen significant improvements and optimization work from the major vendors in the past few months. Gamers will likely see improvements after installing SP1 if they had not yet installed previously released updates that address issues regarding virtual memory space and multi-GPU systems. These updates are now rolled into the SP1 release.
Windows Vista SP1 also includes an updated DirectX runtime which supports all current DirectX 9 and 10 hardware, as well as new 10.1 class hardware. All Direct3D 10.1 class video cards fully support Direct3D 10 features in addition to new capabilities, and games that use Direct3D 10 will work on both 10 and 10.1 class hardware.
Basically, if you have been updating Vista regularly with all the essential updates then the chances of seeing considerable improvements are less. Worth a try though, no doubt about it.