The John Carmack interview on Eurogamer talks with the id Software Technical Director about RAGE, their upcoming first-person shooter (on a related note, here are some new RAGE screenshots). The conversation focuses on the differences between the Windows and console editions of the game and the related issues of coding for the different platforms. He explains they've come up with some new technology that allows a 60Hz game to revert to image tearing rather than 30Hz if the game suffers a hiccup, and says they are bringing this technique to PCs as well:

So what we do on the consoles, where we have this tight control, is we say, OK, you're going 60FPS, it's v-syncing, there are no tear lines. But if you miss by a tiny little bit, we'll let it tear at the top of the screen and we adjust the resolutions dynamically to let it catch back up.

We were able to convince all of the vendors to go ahead and implement that extension on Windows, so we're now able to do that at 60FPS as long as you've got the horsepower. But if you get a hiccup, where it slows down a little bit, it reverts to tearing, which is exactly what we want for gameplay reasons.

That is still one of the cool things about being able to work with OpenGL extensions on there. As soon as we can present a compelling case to these guys, which is basically, look, this $200 console is playing smoother than your $200 system on here, you need to fix this and here's one of the steps you can do there, and they got it done. That's still a good thing.