Ok, I guess I am lost. Why is the world would anyone WANT to run a game, which has textures, models, etc designed for a certain TV resolution/aspect ratio to run in a non native resolution? Your just asking for trouble and let down. There is no way a game designed to run at 720 or 1080 is going to look even close to its original intentions due to wrong aspect ratio and lower resolution.
Simple test, take a nice digital picture at 1920x1280 and resize (not crop) it down to 1024x768. The picture wont look right because the aspect ratio is different. So if its a picture of a person, they will end up looking like a fun house of mirrors person. Does that sound appealing when trying to play COD2? Sure, may be a little funny for the first 10 minutes, but I am sure it will get real old real fast.
Again - 720p = 1280x720, exactly how is a game supposed to look the same when scaled down to 1024x768? You are taking away a couple hundred pixels off on direction and adding 48 pixels the other way.
I have fallen for Adaptec's "hype" in the past and have always been let down. If its not a 2940UW scsi controller then forget it. I spent hundreds on the 2400a IDE Raid controller from them and was a total POS.