I must pacebo-ing, but I cannot be because my 3DMark FireStrike, Unigine Heaven and Unigine Valley scores have all gone up slightly, but beyond the marginal error or margin-of-error (not sure which is the right way to say it). Drivers stayed the same. The improvement was consistent. Did MS do something right again or is my PC just going through placebo effect itself, thinking it can do more than it did before and spitting out higher benchmark numbers???
Has anyone else done any kind of benchmarking before and after the most recent set of updates? I can even play Assassin's Creed: Unity after 1.2.0 patch and on average get 40-50fps @ 1080p @ all settings set to maximum/Ultra quality, but I can't be sure its due to MS updates.
Not all updates improve performance though. Last time I felt improved performance that resulted in somewhat higher benchmark scores was the Windows 8.1 Update 1, which came out almost a year ago. Updates after that didn't improve performance much up until recent November updates. Today I downloaded another 730MB Update that updated whatever it updated in addition to updated a ton of system drivers! I didn't catch any performance increase over the recent November updates, but its nice to have updated system drivers for all kinds of devices that do not get manufacturer updates, like USB Root Hub (xHCL), USB 3.0 eXtensible controller, etc. I think MS is doing the best job on this OS than it ever has on any OS. Except for the Metro ridiculousness, Windows 8.1 is the fastest, most stable, reliable, and dependable OS I ever had. I just hope Windows 10 ends up being either as good as Windows 8.1 with all updates or better!