Forcing video card to scale instead of switching resolution

[silverbacknet]

I'm hoping this isn't a question that's been asked many times, I can't seem to find much discussion on it. I have a 1440p monitor without a scaler, so that when I reduce resolution below native in order to game in some games (because they just ignore the resolution and impose their own maximum), it shows centered instead of stretched. Isn't there any way to make the graphics card render in a lower resolution, then stretch it for the final output? It's not like playing in windowed mode is better, because the window won't stretch!

To me, it seems like this is a problem that should have been solved in the 90's, remove the crappy monitor scaler from the equation and let the powerful graphics card handle it. That's how video playback normally works, after all.

I realized that this would make gaming on my laptop much easier, since it connects to the external over HDMI. Resolution often has to be reduced for performance reasons, which means I lose the edges thanks to crappy overscan problems at lower resolutions. If I could just have the card expand it to the native resolution, even if it's blurry at least it doesn't overscan or make that incredibly annoying two-second black sync to a new resolution.

 

[BrightCandle]

On an NVidia card its an option in the Control panel under "Adjust Desktop size and position". You can set the type of scaling you want and whether it runs on the GPU or desktop. Presumably AMD has something similar?

 

[postmortemIA]

yes, amd has option "enable gpu scaling"
also many better monitors have settings for scaling as well.

 

[iCyborg]

To me, it seems like this is a problem that should have been solved in the 90's, remove the crappy monitor scaler from the equation and let the powerful graphics card handle it. That's how video playback normally works, after all.

As the guys before me said, there's a way to do that on both nV and AMD, and I'm sure Intel too.

That said, why "crappy monitor scaler"? Video playback is different, but for final scaling to the monitor GPUs use fixed hardware and not shaders, so it doesn't matter how powerful GPU is. Some monitors add it too, and while GPUs use the same HW for all monitors, monitors could potentially tune it better. I'd probably prefer monitor scaling if given a choice, although difference in practice is probably minuscule...