Microsoft didn't promise any huge performance increases in the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 beta, so it's not really a surprise to see that, for the most part, there are some very small performance differences between our SP1 and SP2 beta installations.

There are some small performance improvements in certain tests, but there are also some performance drops in others - the most significant being our GIMP image editing test, where we witnessed a 5.5 percent performance decrease.

The best performance increase was in our Crysis benchmark with a pair of Radeon HD 4870 1GB cards running in CrossFire - Microsoft did promise some graphics performance improvements, but they weren't as unanimous as we were expecting them to be. This was really the only scenario out of the six that were tested where we saw any kind of performance increase.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2008/12...-performance/1