Extremetech took Microsoft’s Windows Vista Beta 2 for a spin with a bunch of the top games to see how they would perform; in general, things pretty much worked, except for a few tweaks and issues with drivers, as would be expected with beta software. The biggest problem they encountered was that the Starforce copy protection drivers would not install on Vista; this will either be good news or bad news. If you are unlucky enough to have a game that has Starforce, unless there is a driver update for Vista, those games won’t run. However, if you are hoping that the Starforce copy protection scheme just goes away, this may help that cause. Other issues were with Punkbuster; games that have this enabled have to be run with Administrator privileges. This kind of application-level compatibility may hurt Microsoft’s intent to separate user and administrative accounts on a machine, so hopefully the Punkbuster people will find a way to work around this, and allow games to be run in user mode. There were also issues with games not appearing in Microsoft’s Game Explorer UI. Interestingly, one of the games to not appear in the UI was Microsoft’s on Rise of Legends. Other than the Starforce issues, gamers should feel fairly confident that their games will run correctly in Vista when it ships.

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