Well, it obviously works differently with different games, different drivers etc.
But with the Geforce control panel, you can set it up differently for each game, and save the set-up. I use Vertical sync ON with some games like CFS3, OFF with others - same with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

I'd be interested to know what other settings from the Geforce control panel that you have ON or OFF with CFS3.

My 6800 GT card setup has about 30 games listed, plus "Global Driver Settings". I did try updating the driver,and this gave me about 50 games including PACIFIC FIGHTERS, but that driver resolutely refused to play ball with CFS3, so I went back to an earlier version.
I just have "Global Driver Settings" in the left window and after making the adjustments that I'm trying for the current game, I save it as a new profile, and that shows in the right window. So I select my different profiles from the right window. With CFS3, I changed anti-aliasing from "application controlled" to x4, and matched that in the CFS3 setup. I left anisotropic as "application controlled", increased to "High Quality", put Vertical Sync ON, and Force mip-map OFF.