I suppose this means that with higher ingame fps, the tearing effect is less radical (in small areas of the screen), because the difference between two game frames is smaller. Only 1/fps milliseconds of game occurs between two frames. And when tearing occurs, the frame pieces that are taken are always from frames that are next to each other.
So only 60 frames would be sent. And setting higher refresh rate would just result in worse, if we assume that the monitor starts discarding frames (results in less consistent flow of images).
There's one thing I should ask: How long does it take to send the frame from frame buffer to monitor buffer? Is it close to 16ms?
I would expect that DVI etc bandwidth comes into play here, and that sending a larger image takes more time. This would mean that tearing could occur between many frames easily (if the transfer takes up to many milliseconds - that's enough time for the frame buffer to update multiple times during one transfer). This would also mean that VSync keeps the frame buffer locked most of the time! That is, if the resolution is anywhere close to the theoretical maximum of the DVI bandwidth.
If I assume that the transfer time is in the scale of milliseconds, then there is still one interesting point more: At least in theory, the higher bandwidth link you have between video card and monitor, the less tearing you see. (or, the faster you can transfer the image - so lower resolution would also affect this)
Just my thoughts!
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