D. Hugh Redelmeier:
One hopes that Gnome scaling does a better job of anti-aliasing than running the display in a non-native resolution. But I don't actually know.
Anil Felipe Duggirala:
Well. Ive now tried, and using the 1920x1080 resolution does make everything look less defined, including fonts.
That's the result I would expect. If you send a non-native resolution to the monitor, it will have to scale it. It's difficult for a screen to show something that doesn't match it's pixel count (CRTs were better for that, as graphics pixels were never a 1:1 match for CRT pixels, the electron beam scanned across them, and the screen naturally softened things a bit).
But when it comes to things like fonts, if you generate them at the size you want, for the native resolution of the whole system (graphics card and monitor), that's always got to have the best results.
Things like images either scale reasonably well or rather badly, it depends on their content.