as ridiculous as the thread title sounds, this was actually legit back in the pc gaming dark ages (i consider them generally 95-03), starting with the n64/ps/dreamcast and continuing up into the 360 era. windows 9x / xp were horrible with drivers, and consoles back then enjoyed dedicated hardware, with vram sometimes more than what was offered n top of the line pcs. that ran in a far more efficient way. fps was the only genre that pc gamers really got to enjoy in the way PC gaming should be enjoyed, back then.
I don't really understand why you conflate 9x (DOS kernel) with XP (NT kernel). BSOD was a rarity in the latter.
I stopped using 9x back in 2000 with Windows 2000 (yes, it had DX9, EAX, Multimedia features, unlike NT4).
I don't consider it a dark age era, for me 95-03 was the Golden Age era of PC gaming.
Only people who experienced the transition from software rasterization to 3D accelerators (3Dfx Voodoo) and then programmable shaders (GeForce 3) will understand what I'm talking about.
From the Nvidia grass demo (we saw something equivalent on PS3's Flower thanks to Cell SPUs and Zelda BoTW physics-based grass later on), to the Chameleon/Zoltar demos, PC truly had the crown back then:
Naughty Dog reached Zoltar's level of facial expression fidelity with GeForce 7 and a little bit of help from Cell to assist vertex shader animations.
That's why I love so much the PS360 era (and Switch), it's because it reminds me of the DX7-8-9 era of PC gaming.
I may have a beefy PC myself, but I'm not impressed by modern PC gaming (too much focus on RGB Xmas circus bling, too many edgelords being tech illiterate and shouting to be PC Mustard Rice). Back in the mid 90s/early 2000s it was very, very different compared to today. Different audience, different climate.
Also, consoles never had more VRAM than PCs. Back in 1999 Dreamcast only had 8MB VRAM, while on PC you could have a RIVA TNT2 with 32MB VRAM or a GeForce 256 with 64MB VRAM and T&L as a bonus.
I get it, internet was not that accessible back then and building a PC required far more knowledge than today, but arguably it was the Golden Era of PC gaming and sadly it's never coming back.