Gaming and desktop file operations

Team Fortress 2
A round of desktop benchmarks wouldn't be complete without some gaming tests, and we've selected Valve's multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 for that purpose. To test TF2, I recorded a demo of myself playing as Pyro and Soldier in a ~30-player match on the game's cp_dustbowl map, then played it back using the "timedemo" function three times for each test.

We tested at a 1680x1050 resolution with the game's detail levels set to their highest settings. HDR lighting and motion blur were enabled. Antialiasing was disabled, and texture filtering was set to trilinear filtering only.

We see the same result in Team Fortress 2 as in our previous benchmarks. In this case, SP1 actually improves performance by a fraction of a frame per second, but even die-hard gamers probably can't detect such a minute change.

Drive-to-drive file copy testing

For this test, we copied a 700MB video file from one 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hard drive to another hard drive of the same model, and we recorded the transfer time using our stopwatch. As with all our previous tests, we ran each file copy three times and averaged the results to rule out any flukes in testing.

For the first time, we see SP1 actually distance itself from the RTM version. Microsoft's claims of higher file operation speeds check out at least in this particular instance, where performance goes up by almost 24% from Vista RTM to Vista SP1.

Time and hardware constraints prevented us from running additional file copy and network copy tests, but other benchmarks we've seen around the Web suggest single-disk or disk-to-disk file operations are indeed quicker overall (but not always) in SP1. The picture for network copies is a little foggier, though, since one of our editors has run into performance issues with network shares on his own system following an update to SP1.