At least on macOS and X11/xrandr --scale, the output encoder does the scaling, not the GPU. It need less energy to do that, than spinning up the GPU, and the al

At least on macOS and X11/xrandr --scale, the output encoder does the scaling, not the GPU. It need less energy to do that, than spinning up the GPU, and the all GPU resources are available to the applications (scaling entire framebuffer at 60 Hz would take significant memory bandwidth from GPU at least).