Microsoft’s new operating system Windows Vista, previously known under the codename of Longhorn, won’t be released until the next year, but we should be already preparing for it, especially those of us who are into computer games. Gamers’ interests are rather neglected in the published previews of the new OS, and this is not quite right, in our opinion. Yes, it’s exciting and useful to know as much information about a new OS as possible, but each OS, however innovative it may be, has no practical value for the end user without applications.

Games are a most widespread and popular variety of typical applications that people run on their desktop computers. It goes without argument that quite a lot of future users of Windows Vista will play games, so it’s important to know how your graphics subsystem will perform in the new OS. Moreover, although the transition to the new OS is going to be a smooth and steady process for the computer world, gamers won’t avoid it just because the upcoming gaming titles will require support of technologies that can only be delivered by Windows Vista.

That’s the background behind this review. We want to fill in the blank and carry out a test of today’s graphics cards in the publicly available version of Windows Vista using a few popular games.

We took part in the Windows Vista customer preview program Microsoft offered in June. The company placed a Beta 2 version of the new OS (build 5384) on its website and made it available for download by ordinary users. We took the opportunity and downloaded the 64-bit version of Vista Beta 2 because the share of systems with 64-bit processors will only be growing in the future whereas the share of 32-bit systems will be shrinking.

This customer preview program for Windows Vista Beta 2 has been finished by now and the new OS isn’t available for download anymore. But those who have participated in the program will have an opportunity to test Windows Vista RC1, so this review will hopefully be complemented with new information soon. When you are reading and analyzing the results of our tests, you should always keep it in your mind that we got them with a beta version of the new OS. A lot of components in Windows Vista Beta 2 are not yet optimized, so our results may differ greatly from those you are going to have in the final or in the RC1 version of Microsoft’s new OS. You should regard them as a very, very rough estimate because the OS itself and the appropriate graphics drivers from ATI and Nvidia will yet undergo numerous changes until they reach the end user. It will take a long while till they take their final shape and are installed on our testbed and in your gaming computers for everyday use.

Before testing graphics cards under Windows Vista, we’d like to tell you about the new OS from Microsoft and our experience with it, focusing on the graphics technologies implemented in Vista.