AMD "Virtual Super Resolution" is actually pretty effective.

You can see where the setting is located in the AMD Settings application here:

Let's all love Lain.

This effectively cranks up the resolution past your monitor's native rez & does some fancy scaling BS at the cost of some minor horsepower and the result is, well...

You get that much more desktop/screen real-estate. I set Windows' scaling settings to 105% to make the text a little more clear, though it was quite legible anyway. This will of course vary depending on the size of your monitor. In my case, it's a 27 inch model. If you have to set the scaling to 125% or more to see everything, then there's not a whole lot of point to increasing the resolution without increasing the size of your screen, cause it'll be just as cluttered as it was before if your folders 'n other windows have to be sized up to be legible. Though I did not have it enabled in the screenshot, enabling Integer Scaling is absolutely necessary. It clears up the smaller text greatly.

The only drawback here aside from that ^ is that if you intend on gaming or watching higher-rez movies, the power & resource usage will be that much higher even though you're not getting a "true" increase of resolution. I noticed Wallpaper Engine, a live/animated wallpaper application sold on Steam, was using a good chunk more resources despite my preference of animated wallpapers that are not very active. Some water trickling, something to illustrate that the wind is blowing, etc. Not enough to use a lot of power as opposed to many of the more lively wallpapers you can find.
I should add that whether or not the resolution is higher will not affect resource usage on live wallpapers which utilize movie files or gifs of which each are a set size will only be scaled up or down (at apparently no cost to resources) depending on the rez vs live render-type wallpapers which have no predetermined resolution.

Idle GPU usage went from around 2-5% to 15-20%. Granted, my GPU is rather old, an R9 270X OC from 2013 or so. Fine for casual use, but not able to just run 4K animations in the background without a little sweating. So your results will definitely vary, especially if you're on a laptop.
(assuming many laptops even support this kinda thing?) It's worth trying out though, it can't hurt your device though it might strain your eyes if you're not careful. Give it a try! Nvidia has their own version of it, though I don't know what they call it for sure & I'm too lazy to look it up. :v