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Alternative questions:
How can the screen stretch be disabled under lower resolutions on Windows?
Is it possible to enforce a 1:1 pixel mapping between the system image output and the display's physical pixels?

Usually, video card drivers GUI has a clean option to disable stretch (Enable GPU up-scaling for ATI, Image Scaling for nVidia, etc) and it's basically an option to position output in the monitor center while adding blank lines on the edges.
On the older laptops, this specific option was sometimes placed in BIOS.

In my case: laptop with both CPU and discrete card, no BIOS option (except discrete card on/off), under Windows 10 nVidia and Intel graphic driver - there was no standard option for scaling. For example, NVIDIA Control Panel had Display entry missing and looked this way:

NVIDIA Control Panel

For example, the goal is to run a DOS 640x480 application on a modern 1920x1080 monitor. Usually, GPU scaling will stretch the image (1920/640 = 3, 1080/480 = 2.25), resulting in a blurry image and incorrect aspect ratio.
A good solution would be to use (640x480)x2 = 1280x960 on the host and to disable stretch to get pixel perfect 2x scaled picture with correct aspect ratio. Just in case - this also is convenient when combined with virtual machine, because scaling under VM can be set to fast linear, which does not require heavy emulated GPU load.

Is there a way to disable scaling if no GUI option is visible in the drivers?

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As far as Intel is concerned: They removed and later re-added the "disable GPU scaling" option in their newer control panel. However, it is named "maintain display scaling", or in German "Displayskalierung beibehalten". This is the actual "let the display do the scaling" or "disable GPU scaling" option you may be searching for. See this screen shot for reference. I had to fight this right now for a mini-PC which overheats and throttles when the Intel-GPU does the scaling.disable GPU scaling named unclear for Intel GPU drivers

Found an English screen shot with the same option from a different question Only Maintain Display Scaling in Intel graphics control panel :

disable GPU scaling named unclear for Intel GPU drivers

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  • Thanks for adding this, in my case that was exact case - integrated Intel GPU driver had no such option in official UI. Very frustrating when you need to load 1.5 GB just to see it missing. And bypass solution via registry I posted was much faster and simpler - slightly disappointing that this QA went almost unnoticed. Commented Sep 8, 2022 at 17:22
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For the Windows 10 possible easy scenario without installing drivers:

  • switch display resolution to something rare, like 1360x768
  • search for this resolution in the middle of registry keys under

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\GraphicsDrivers\Configuration\<Your_Active_Path>\00\00\PrimSurfSize.*

Most of top keys in the list are not changed, they will still contain previous resolution. Search specifically PrimSurfSize keys.

  • After locating correct <Your_Active_Path> key, change Scaling in the <Your_Active_Path>\00\00\Scaling to 1 or 2

  • And test if this worked with switching resolution to any other value - effect must be applied immidiately without restart.

(If for some reason it's hard to locate the correct path to key, comparing registry snapshots right before and right after resolution change will directly lead to the <Your_Active_Path>; For example, save snapshots from regedit and compare them with Total Commander in only differences mode)

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