Watching 1080p clips on 720p monitor?

[Necudo1]

Can someone please explain this to me.Can i watch 1080p youtube clips on my 720p monitor,and is that really "true" full hd?

 What i realized is that 1080p clips indeed look better than 720p ones but that's strange because my 1366x769 obviously isn't full hd?

Or for example when im comparing between 720p vs 1080p game screenshots,i can somewhat see the difference so how's that possible if i only have 720p monitor?

[delet my acc pls]

If you have 1080p and downscale it to 720p, the stuff will look better than native.

[Maverik5124]

It is the same concept as anti aliasing. By downscaling the image to your screen resolution the staircase effect gets reduced and the whole picture looks smoother

[hiyayhi]

As others above have stated, down scaling from a higher res will always look better than native but not as good as having a native high res screen.

[Zeruel]

4k looks amazing still on 1080p