Posted on Wednesday, August 15 2007 @ 1:40 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
AnandTech has another look at Windows Vista now that Microsoft has released two hotfixes which improve the performance and reliability, they took a look at how the performance fix affects the performance of your system.
Having seen the results of the hotfix, we can unequivocally say that anyone doing serious gaming under Windows Vista should install the hotfix (and the latest drivers for their video card) at the first chance they get. It's not a solution to the 2GB barrier, but it is a solution to Vista's extreme virtual address space usage. For gamers who are or may be experiencing crashes related to the 2GB barrier, and who are weary of the fixes we outlined in part 1, this is the best solution to resolving the problem for now.
We'd like to pause on "for now" though, as in spite of our enthusiasm for this hotfix we can't ignore the fact that this is a fix to take care of what we feel was a stupid problem in Vista long-overdue for a solution, but that's it. This hotfix won't resolve the 2GB barrier; at best it buys some more time for the 32-bit (x86) version of Vista, and at worse it's no better for applications that don't make heavy use of video memory. The 2GB barrier is still the imposing problem this series is all about, and dealing with it won't be any easier, but with this hotfix at least status quo is (nearly) maintained a bit longer.
