After reading a whole list of documents about true, integer scaling, half values and monolithic people i've almost given up on finding some middle ground between the visible and the readable in games.

Some of the games i enjoy to play scale horrific on the 2k monitor i'm using. Take for example Alpha Centauri which refuses to take on a nice shape with nvidia's integer scaling enabled and looks absolutely horrendous with either full screen spread or aspect ratio spread, on 2k.

I'm currently using 1080p on the 2k monitor which improves live a lot but looks absolutely ridiculous! after carefully adding some sharpening the blurred view is less blurred but still leaves some undesired artifacts.
I was hoping to find someone with either a similar path of progress with an at least B- answer or a complete other solution to this problem.

This is why my 1920x1200 LCD has still not been replaced with any more modern display, although I would get one of those new 1ms 4k IPS panels instantly if it were confirmed that they have native aspect ratio setting and that there are no weird latency issues when the input resolution is anything between 320x200 and 1920x1080.

I indeed have some regrets about migrating to a 2k resolution, if i'm not mistaken 4k should handle things a lot better, there is one in the household, one of the cheaper ones that are becoming widely available so maybe i should snatch that one to try it out and see what happens, most of my regrets came from the increased usage for the gpu in host of games, it seems that 1080p on aspect ratio and nvidia sharpening provides actually for a nice enough playthrough in strategy titles ...

There seems to be some apps out there, also used for displaying old nintendo games on widescreen that might have some extra effect in clearing stuff up but for now i'm happy with the C+ grade i achieved with fiddling around with the amount of sharpening

you need a different aspect ratio monitor , nothing else will work
you can try to play in windowed mode thou

You could try borderless windowed on a black background. Not a black desktop wallpaper, but just a black image opened in an image viewer that can go fullscreen (so it hides the taskbar too), then alt-tab to the game window. Look on this pcgamingwiki page about borderless programs. Setting custom resolutions will also help, if you wanna use something between 1920*1080 and 2560*1440.

For me, Borderless Gaming seems to work the best, with the help of SRWE (Simple Runtime Window Editor) to get the right coordinates to center the window. The only issue I had is that the image can have some sort of jagginess (noticed especially on text), but changing the resolution in game to something else, then back to the resolution I intended to use, solved the problem.