cxm717 wrote:

....It does have some large drawbacks of course like directx and dos support.

and, which are those non-directx / non-dos games should we expect to play with NT? 🤣

Quake I/II/II
Half Life
anything else that's OpenGL based.

SDL-based games also have a better chance of running as well.

NT3.51 has no directx/directdraw which is unfortunate from a games perspective.

It shipped with minimal OpenGL support (version 1.0, no texturing). I'm not sure how well it performs for doing 2D graphics.

Doing screen updates from a memory buffer with GDI seems to be pretty slow, at least with the generic VESA video driver.

WinG will install! Maybe that would be faster than GDI, although I think WinG only handled 8bpp color. Some old WinG games should work though.

Unfortunately, NT 3.51 had very limited hardware support compared to NT4.0...

It couldn't make full use of anything better. Only some very, very old video cards and ISA sound cards are supported, and I recall the hardware support was even worse compared to WfW 3.11 (some devices have drivers for WfW, but not NT 3.51). It's also not properly supported by virtualization solutions (VBox/VMware) as well, but I think one might be able to set up a usable one if familiar with QEMU. (An alternative for video cards called VBEMP supports NT 3.51 but it won't not provide support for 3D acceleration, only basic ones)

NT4.0 SP6, on the other hand, has much better hardware support as well as on virtualization solutions.

NT4 is good for StarCraft / BroodWar and Warcraft 2 Battle.net Edition.

This is a physical PC?
as DOS games only supported IPX and not MS's implementation of it, and this is the OS games mainly ran under during the windows 3 era.

Either flavor of Windows 3.x have very limited games, even less that support networking, and the few (if any) will be more likely to support IPX then TCP.

I do have Windows for Workgroups installed and networked with the TCP/IP 3.11b patch and it works well with the rest of my retro PC's right upto WinXP, but its used for file transfers not gaming.