Will Vista Run Your Games?
mikemuch writes "With Vista reaching the more stable beta 2 designation, Jason Cross at ExtremeTech decided to run a slew of popular PC games -- Oblivion, F.E.A.R, GTA, Civ IV, WoW, and more -- on the OS to see what will and won't run, and how well. His findings are encouraging, but unsurprisingly the OS is not quite ready for prime time. Some work is needed on the part of driver writers, Microsoft, and game developers to get the gaming experience ready for launch day. The biggest problem he found was StarForce copy protection and a performance drop-off in many of the games when using anti-aliasing. From the article: 'With Microsoft proclaiming a "PC gaming renaissance" around the launch of Vista, they need to really deliver a fantastic experience, and it's not quite there yet.'"
I've seen Unix binaries for HPUX run 7 major versions after the original compilation, and we didn't have source. So I think that pretty damn near 100% backwards compatibility for a more used OS should be achievable.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?