You can't control the actual refresh rate of the monitor or TV. The display refreshes at 60hz, you can draw every frame, or every other frame and have twice the time.
And yet, like he says, Rage looks better than most 30hz games.
Depends on the monitor. You're pretty much stuck when it comes to most current TVs and LCD/LED displays as well (60Hz, 70Hz, 75Hz sometimes 100Hz).
Before flat screens were affordable we were all using CRTs. A good CRT could push a 150Hz refresh rate. When Quake3 was still being played competitively (it /kind/ of still is with QuakeLive, but it's not the same anymore imo) we ran the game at a capped 120 FPS, set the monitor refresh to 120Hz and then turned on V-sync which equated to the smoothest and most responsive experience I've ever had in a game - it's pretty much indescribable and most people would argue that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway, but even though solid 60 FPS on a v-synced 60Hz screen in most modern games comes pretty close, you can definitely feel the difference.
The worst is when you have some FPS lag with v-sync enabled - then it's a lot more noticeable than without v-sync.
I remember that during Quake4's (the 60FPS cap was hardcoded in Quake4, and somehow part of the engine, which in theory at least, made 120FPS/120Hz redundent) short run on the comeptitive scene, players complained that they wanted the cap lifted from 60FPS to 120FPS (or just any configurable number) so they could play on 120Hz monitors. id finally caved and released a patch which allowed this, and this made a huge difference. It definitely gave you an edge over the 60/60 players.
Thank you for pointing this out. People sometimes think I'm crazy when i talk about pushing really high fps. The human eye can detect objects that exist for 1/200th of a second, so pushing higher framerates will always make things smoother. I'm really surprised that all lcd monitors aren't running at 120hz or 240hz, obviously they can't be that hard to make if the tv manufactures are pushing them out.
You're right, I've argued with a few of my friends over this in the past. Also, something I should have mentioned before (and I should correct myself), the refresh rate on a LCD screen isn't quite the same thing as that on the CRT. So, even though a 120Hz LCD would refresh the image 120 times a second, for some reason it just doesn't feel as nice and fluid as on the CRT.
That v-sync mouse lag I mentioned has only ever happened to me when I'm using an LCD rather than CRT - which is the main reason why I wouldn't use v-sync when playing an FPS.
And yet, like he says, Rage looks better than most 30hz games.