The blog post here 'The Visual Studio Profiler on Windows 8' states this:

Windows 8 added logic to prevent all incompatible versions of the profiling driver from starting (2010, 2008, and 2005).

This means that when you try to start profiling with an incompatible version you will receive the message “Error VSP1398: The monitor was unable to start the VS performance driver. Access is denied. Consider using the /Admin:Driver,Start and /Admin:Security options of VSPerfCmd from an elevated environment.”

Which will result in the following behavior when running Visual Studio 2010 (or earlier) on Windows 8.

• CPU Sampling, .NET Memory Allocation, and Concurrency profiling will fail to start on Windows 8. The only workaround on Windows 8 is to use Visual Studio 2012 Professional or higher, or to profile on Windows 7.

• Instrumentation profiling can be launched, but the application and elapsed times will be exactly the same.