Video Cards & Screen Tearing?!

Screen tearing (artifacting) is usually caused by heat or power issues. So, as long as you take care of both of those, you shouldn't have a problem with high-end video, at high settings. You need quality components and good cooling to keep these things from happening. Keeping overclocking at reasonable levels helps as well.

I think he means the screen tearing that occurs when your cards run a game much faster than the monitor's refresh rate. Then you get old and new pixels on the screen at the same time with clear lines of demarcation.

You would get a fast card anyway because it'll be able to hold your frames above 60 Hz for longer.

That is a good point, so having a fast display and then synching the video card and monitor is another important factor. This gets into faster response times, refresh rates, etc.

Gaming platforms generally are closed loop systems, with minimal variables to control. Gaming PCs have much more flexibility and aren't as specifically or stringently designed/implemented. Really an apples and bananas comparison in terms of performance.

For me a fast display fixed all tearing. I went from 12ms 1600x1200 to 1ms 1920x1080 and it fixed all tearing. I am sure a 120hz would help to.

It fixed it because now your display is fast enough to refresh as often or more often than your Gpu can send frames.