

SecureROM: SecureROM is DRM software, and it’s found on quite a few games.

Even so, I ran into some problems worth mentioning. In the past, some digital rights management schemes might have used drivers, but this practice is less common today. The net result is that anything requiring driver-level access needs to be rewritten. The Windows 8 kernel has changed as well.

Windows 8, due to its complete restructuring of the underlying desktop rendering system, is quite different. The underlying rendering technology in Windows 7 differed in only minor ways.

Although the initial shipments of Windows Vista had some serious bugs and other problems that adversely affected game performance, updates to Vista over time fixed most of them. Users who transitioned from Windows Vista to Windows 7 saw some performance gains in games, but those gains were fairly minimal. After that, I installed the Windows 8 RTM plus all updates and drivers, and then reran all the tests.īefore diving into the performance results, though, I should talk about some issues I encountered while installing and running the games and benchmarks. I ran a first pass of benchmarks using Windows 7 (Service Pack 1 installed), along with the latest Windows 7 drivers.
