they do affect the lod system.
forza 5 4k dlss perf
game literally uses better textures, higher level of lods at 4k/dlss performance. both are supposed to be 1080p. fsr 2 is similar story but I did not record. in game res. scale uses something like FSR 1. when you use in game res. scale to get back to 1080p, it results exactly like how a 1080p native image look
in this example you can literally see 4k/dlss performance uses better lods, higher quality assets, and even draw distance is affected by "master" upscaled resolution.
MipMaps are dependent on native screen resolution. This defines the distance at which a mipmap level is changed.
So at lower screen resolutions, the next level of mipmap will be loaded at a shorter distance from the camera.
When we upscale an image, be it with a spatial or temporal upscaler, the game only knows about the base resolution.
So a game rendering at 1440p using an upscaler, at 66% screen resolution, will use the Mipmap values of 960p.
This will look bad, because the game will load the next level of mipmaps too soon, resulting in blurrier textures, closer to the camera.
So the developer has to manually tune the mipmap bias, to force the game to load the mipmap bias adequate to the output resolution.
You might have seen Alex complaining about some games not properly adjusting the mipmap bias. And then talking about using the gpu control panel, to offset the mipmap bias.
This is something that should be done by the devs, not the users.
Now game engines are also using screen resolution to scale other parts of the rendering pipeline.
For example, nanite renders triangles in relation to pixel size.
Here is a page from the DLSS manual, on implementing mipmap ias.