There are a few edge cases like BioShock, where you need DirectX 10 for the fancy water effects, but still want to retain a degree of EAX support (via OpenAL and/or Creative ALchemy) for improved sound positioning and reverb/occlusion effects. You can accomplish this by running that game under Windows 7 while using an X-Fi sound card. I'm not sure how well X-Fi drivers work under newer Windows versions (beyond Win7), but maybe someone else can chime in.

There are also maintenance benefits for dual booting WinXP with Win7. The latter allows you to use USB 3.0 and larger (> 2TB) hard drives. This is useful for easily transferring GOG offline installers from an external USB 3.0 HDD to your WinXP drive, for example.

The original release of Halo 2 probably.

InkBall is bundled with Windows Vista (and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, if you can get a hold of that). It won't run on Windows 7.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-08-05, 08:58:

There are also maintenance benefits for dual booting WinXP with Win7. The latter allows you to use USB 3.0 and larger (> 2TB) hard drives.

My Core 2 Quad PC has a Via USB 3.0 controller with Windows XP drivers. Hard disk drives up to 17.5 TB in size should work as long as they use 4 KiB sectors.