Q: Will the Vista Service Pack improve FPS?

I believe I have all the hotfixes, so do I still have a few more FPS to look forward to by installing Vista SP1?

 

Not really. At least nothing significant. Hotfixes are all about stability.

 

for FPS u have to find yourself an appropriate Video Card Driver...
SP1 will just ensure that the driver is installed fully without giving blank screen errors

 

Yeah, I highly doubt about it. I remembered, when Microsoft released SP2, my 3DMark score aren't too differ, so I think this would happen similarly.

 

Considering how poorly Vista is optimized you might see some improvement. But for d3d opengl apps, it probably won't be too noticable.

Btw, FPS is a unit. "Will installing a compressor increase my car's km/h (mph)?"

 

there will be performance improvements in game with sp1

some benchmarks using the sp1 RC

 

Little performance increase to none (RTM -> SP1). That is in games, but way better transfer rates and responsiveness. But still, more than 0% performance increase.
I have to quote something I'm not sure you noticed:
"8GB DDR2-800 4-5-4-15" -> meaning Vista uses all, while XP uses about 3GB. Next time I'm going to buy a desktop, I'm gonna make sure I get 8GB of RAM, just for the fun of having 8GB. Not expensive (can get 8GB for around 250$ or around 200E here), but definitely worth it if you have x64.

 

Not by much.

I thought about something last week. As some people know, DX10, unlike DX9.0C, doesn't feature native support for the previous DX versions but uses emulation instead. So when you play a DX9 game, the dx9 instructions are emulated through DX10.
I think that this thing has more impact on the performances than the Vista supposed to be a "ressource hog".

Of course drivers are the things having the most impact, especially in opengl applications, where neither ATI or Nvidia has done significant implementation in the drivers yet.

On the other hand, most people won't see any differences if they don't use a FPS counter