CoreCtrl with Nvidia RTX 3080 Founder's Edition? (downvolting)

murbert It has 100, 200 or 300%

300%? I haven't seen that one in Budgie yet. There are other distros that include the GNOME implentation of fractional scaling in their Budgie editions, though. Zorin is one, and I've seen others. They're scaled in increments of 25%, like 125%, 150%, and so on. In my experience, they don't work well, so if fractional scaling is needed, it's a lot better to use a KDE implementation like Solus Plasma.

snowee This article gives a basic but reasonably clear explanation of how fractional scaling works. Display scaling -- the need for it or not -- depends on the size of your monitor and the acuteness of your eyes.

Like most people, I tend to view my computer screens from 24"-30" away. At that distance, 1920x1080 resolution is too small to comfortably read on my 13.5" laptop, marginal on my 15" laptop, but fine on my 27" desktop monitor. As a result, I scale at 150% on the 13.5" laptop display, 125% on the 15" laptop display and 100% on the 27" desktop display.

Scaling changes what you see on the screen, obviously. This is what I see on Plasma at different scaling at 1920x1080 resolution, using this page as an example:

100% (27" desktop)

125% (15" laptop)

150% (13.5" laptop)

Obviously, less content is displayed the higher the scaling, but it beats having a lot of content too small to read.

Scaling is universal, so Steam games display differently depending on the scaling selected. The issue you are most likely to encounter is that games are inconsistent with respect to supporting 4K. It is much better now than it was 3-4 years ago, but 4K scaling support isn't yet universal. Depending on what games you play, it is possible that you might run into a frame rate issue with a 4K display -- 4k pushes a lot more pixels than UHD -- but I doubt that given your GPU.

The lack of fractional scaling is no different for a game than it is for any other application, and a 4K monitor is no different than a UHD monitor in this respect, in the sense that what counts is what you can see comfortably on the display. The reason that Budgie's relative lack of fractional scaling (100%/200%/300% but nothing in between, like 125% or 150%) might present a problem is that you are less likely to find a combination of display size and scaling that works well for you.

I can't show you fractional scaling on Budgie because I use Plasma, but the screenshots above should give you an idea.

WetGeek 300%? I haven't seen that one in Budgie yet.

I had the same thought, but I think I figured out the answer. We are both using UHD 1920x1080 displays, on which 300% would be useless. @murbert is using a 2560x1600 display, at which 300% is probably quite workable. My guess is that's why we don't see anything above 200% but @murbert does. Windows works that way, too. On my UHD computers, the stock Windows fractionals are 100/125/150/175, but when I go into the advanced settings, I can go up to 500% (read the screen one letter at a time, I guess). If I remember correctly, a 4K 17" XPS display I looked at the other day was set to "250% (Recommended)" and scaling stock sets went up to 400%.

snowee Here is my idea, do you think it will work?
get a 27" 4K monitor
continue with Budgie, set resolution for desktop usage to 1920 x 1200 (this is my current screen res)
before gaming, set resolution to 4K
immediately start up Steam
play games on Steam at 4K resolution

I would not mess with screen resolution because the results will not be satisfactory (fuzziness and so on).

I would work with fractional scaling instead, changing the scaling back and forth between normal use and games.

At 4K resolution, Budgie offers 100%/200%/300%. One of those settings is likely to be satisfactory for running Budgie for normal purposes on a 4K monitor, although it might not be identical to running Budgie at 1920x1080.

As a lifelong mentor used to remind me, "Life is a game of inches." Running Budgie on a 4K monitor, you might never get to "perfect", but you will probably get to "good enough".

I think you will like 4K, no matter what the scaling, because the screens tend to be very clear because of the high number of pixels. The next time you are in a computer store, look at an Apple laptop running Retina or a Dell XPS running a high-resolution screen. Both are scaled significantly, but the displays are gorgeous even so. That's what you will likely get running Budgie at 200% or 300% on a 4k monitor. You just might have to get used to a slightly different screen layout.