Windows Versions and Gaming Performance

  Windows 8.1 Professional Installation and Use: The installation process for Windows 8.1 was similar to that of Windows 10 and overall went smooth. Once the installation was complete however is when the problems started. The first issue I encountered was that the default network drivers did not work. In order to resolve this issue, I had to boot up Windows 10 on my main SSD, download the drivers from my motherboard's website, and then reboot back onto Windows 8.1 and install them there. That resolved the network connection issue.  The next issue I encountered actually ended up affecting my benchmarking. Windows by default only was detecting one of my two monitors. I knew this was because of the fact that there were 130 Windows updates that needed to be installed and because I was still using the default Windows graphics driver and not the latest one from Nvidia.  After installing all 130 Windows updates, I tried installing Nvidia GeForce Experience which automatically de...

 Windows 10 Professional Installation and Use: The installation process for Windows 10 is simple and very straight forward. I experienced no problems during the installation and setup of 10, as to be expected given that it is the most recent version of Windows (as of the time I came up with the plan for this blog, Windows 11 just launched I believe but that will stay outside of the scope of this blog since my hardware is not compatible anyway). Installing all of the software and games that I needed was simple and required no extra steps in order for the software to be compatible. There were some issues with a couple of the games but those issues are because of the games being outdated or blocking the benchmarking software I was using. I will elaborate more on those when I go over each game. The software I used to benchmark all of these games is MSI Afterburner with RivaTuner, which comes with MSI Afterburner. This software allowed me to display overlays on the games with ...