Swapinterval

feels like playing with a huge delay with vsync on

dunno

all a bunch of crap, you really won't play better than on a 60hz LCD.. ofcourse it's more fun to play on a "smoother image" but I'm more satisfied with a small design screen on my desk than a big CRT screen

i know vsyns decreases your fps, and i've heard it's common to turn it off in fps games like et & cs because it's then easier to aim/not more difficult.

tearing is an artifact, mostly seen on CRT monitors, because of VSync being off. VSync is a method by which the frame in the video card's back buffer is released in sync with the monitor's refresh rate. This makes it so that each frame coming from the video card coincides with the monitor redrawing the screen. When VSync is off frames can be released from the back buffer as fast as the card can output them. When this rate exceeds the refresh rate, you get tearing.

A CRT screen has phosphors that are excited (made to glow) when struck by the electron gun inside the monitor. The phosphors continue to glow for a short period of time after the gun strikes the phosphor; this is also why people get headaches from low refresh rates, as the phosphors begin to fade before the gun scans them again, causing a fading then brightening effect that looks sort of like a strobe light.

Tearing occurs because the output from the video card exceeds the refresh rate of the monitor, usually be a fairly good margin. For example, the monitor draws frame 1, but by the time the gun gets to the bottom of the screen and returns to the top to draw the next frame, if the video card is releasing frame 4 from the backbuffer, the lower part of the screen is still retaining part of the image from frame 1 as the monitor begins drawing frame 4. If all of the objects on the screen are static and not moving you don't notice tearing, but moving objects show the difference between these two frames and as a tearing effect.