Windows Vista has supposedly reached the point where it's stable enough for everyday work, with only some "little things" that need to be fixed. With that in mind, we installed a bunch of games on the new Vista Beta 2 to see what works and what doesn't. Windows Vista just hit the Beta 2 milestone, and it's frankly too early for us to confidently say you can use it (on a non-critical machine) all day for all your normal tasks. But there was one thing we've wanted to check for a long time, and had to keep telling ourselves, "it's just too early." How well will our games run on Vista? Are there going to be major compatibility problems? Will the performance stink?

We feel that Beta 2 is the appropriate time to start looking at compatibility and performance issues in Vista, and that goes for gaming (one of the big selling points of Vista) as well. So we spent the better part of a week installing a bunch of modern, popular games on the upcoming OS, noting what works and what doesn't, and trying to find some simple workarounds. Has Vista got game yet? Let's find out.

ExtremeTech