Scaling display resolution past native

[ghelyar]

This is a bit of a weird question.

Displays can stretch a smaller resolution to display on a higher native resolution screen. For example, you can put 800x600 on a 1024x768 display and have it stretch to fill the whole screen.

Is there any way to perform the reverse of this? For example, to have a graphics card (or Windows, or 3rd party software) scale down a 1024x768 desktop resolution to an 800x600 signal before sending it to the native 800x600 display?


These aren't the specific resolutions I'm using, they are just to make the examples simpler.


This is using Windows, a modern Nvidia graphics card and LCD displays.


I'm aware that it doesn't provide much of an advantage over just using the native resolution and don't really care about the quality of the picture, but I want to try some things out before I buy a higher resolution second display.