How do I run Half-Life 2 in 4k on a 1080p monitor?

I would like to play Half-Life 2 with my GeForce GTX 970 at 4k on a 1080p monitor. How would I do that? I have tried to adding custom resolutions in the NVIDIA control panel but I couldn't get 4k to work. I did get 1440p to work but it looked blurry.

0

3 Answers

This only applies to NVIDIA graphics cards like GTX 970 and higher.

First open up the NVIDIA control panel and enable "DSR - Factors", Choose a DSR setting of your choice.

Next open up GeForce Experience, and select the game you want to enable DSR on, and click the wrench icon.

Select the available DSR resolution and click apply

GeForce Experience will now show the current resolution as a DSR resolution

Next confirm the resolution in game

Source

A 1080p monitor doesn't support 4K resolution.

2

Edit 2: ignore my answer, Chippie's one above is the best way to do this, if you have a GTX970 or higher.

Some games (e.g. GTA5 using the 'Frame Scaling Mode' setting) have support for this (rendering at a higher resolution then downscaling to the native res of your monitor) but unfortunately HL2/Source engine games are not among them. (Actually this can be done with an external program, see my edit below.)

If you want to force a 4k resolution, your monitor would need to support resolution scaling when it receives a non-native res, and this doesn't always work properly for many resolutions, hence it looking blurry when forcing 1440p and not working with 4k at all.

Edit: I retract what I just said, it looks like it might be possible using a tool called GeDoSaTo. See this PCGamer article where someone got it running at 8k, it tells you how to do it.

2