My understanding is that downscaling basically throws away the effects of font hinting and of any type of algorithm aligning glyph edges to the pixel grid to ma

My understanding is that downscaling basically throws away the effects of font hinting and of any type of algorithm aligning glyph edges to the pixel grid to make them look sharper. So depending on the user's personal tastes, their vision, their monitor's DPI and the font rendering algorithms used, the difference might range from clearly perceptible to none.