Quality of display scaling on 1080p screen?

Not sure if this is the right place, please move if inappropriate. I'm looking at the Asus Q501LA since it has a good display at a good price. I don't expect to do much gaming but I would like to be able to run, say, Diablo 3. I know that the HD 4400 will handle it at 1366x768, but I don't think it will run at 1080p. I've never had a laptop with a resolution over 1366x768. Would the text in a game still look good at 1366x768 on a 1080p display?

 

It will look decent, just not as crisp as if you were running at native resolution. But don't let that deter you, it will still look good.

 

Before I built my desktop I played most of my games on an HP Pavilion with an AMD 6770M. I ran most games at 1366x768 and like HT said, it wasn't as crisp as if I were running at 1080p (native) but it certainly didn't impact my enjoyment of the games.

 

Great, thanks. My only concern was based on the fact that running lower resolutions (like 1280x720) on my 1366x768 screen made the text difficult to read. I assumed it was because there weren't enough pixels available to do any decent interpolation, but I just wanted some confirmation from someone who had done it on a higher res screen.

 

For text and desktop, it's best to use native resolution. But for games, set the resolution in game to 1280x720 or 1366x768 and it will look fine.

 

as long as you are running at your native resolution, it should be good

 

Well that's the whole issue!

I ended up buying the laptop. Games look OK running at 1280x720, but the in-game text can be very hard to read. Also, some applications, like Chrome as an example, do not seem to handle the resolution well. Text looks very blurry. Firefox on the other hand looks great with very crisp text.

 

On a 15.6 inch it will look alright, but if you connect an external 1080p monitor, it will look bad.
It's likely because of the size, but 720p upscaled to 1080p on a 23 inch monitor looks pretty horrible IMO, especially any text...

 

Why are you running at 1280x720? Also, why are you running everything at that resolution instead of just games?

Reading comprehension is fun.

 

As far as why I chose 720p, it was mainly because it's exactly the same aspect ratio as 1080p and it's the highest the laptop (using HD 4400) can handle games like Diablo 3. 1366x768 works as well but I don't see that much of a visual difference.

I'm not running everything at 720p. My resolution on the laptop is set to 1920x1080. Some applications still come out blurry as though they are scaling. In some cases I can fix this by checking the Disable display scaling on high DPI settings checkbox under Compatibility. But Chrome did not seem to change when I did this.

 

Change font scaling to 100%, that's probably making your text look fuzzy in Windows desktop at least.

Beamed from my G2 Tricorder

 

Ah, it looks like 8.1 may have changed the font scaling to "Smaller" or "Larger" with a setting in the middle (default). Setting it to smaller makes everything tiny but seems to fix the scaling issues with some programs.