G400Max-Descent3-openGL-Colors hammered

[Lurch]

Hi I’ve been using a Hercules TNT2 to play descent3 till last week when I got the G400max. The TNT2 was playable under GL, if for only 5min at a time. So I've been using D3D which works well with either card, but was hoping for improved visuals under Matrox' alleged full GL ICD (I'm not going to rant about Matrox' pitiful previous attempts-personal history: millennium, millennium II, mystique, G200 to name a few, then I defected to Canopus and Hercules- but I'm beginning to fear I'm a bigger sucker than thought), alas to no avail in fact now I can't use GL at all.
I read a number of posts here and at D3's BB and here's what I've tried so far: the drivers that came on the CD, then uninstalled and loaded 5.25, then added g400icd.dll. All that with -nonetwork -nomusic in the startup box, then added -bumped, then added -z32bit, then removed -bumped. I saw where someone suggested there shouldn't be any opengl32.dll on the system so I renamed it .old and D3 won't detect the G400M as a OpenGL card so I renamed g400icd.dll to opengl32.dll (long shot, I know) which made for a BIG CRASH when I ran D3. I reloaded Win98SE not to long ago, completely unloaded the TNT2 drivers and started with standard VGA when I installed the G400m.
By Colors Hammered I'm trying to describe what looks like reverting to 16 or 256 colors.
In addition under random circumstances several (more than 5) times the display goes totally wacked with vertical and horizontal lines scrolling over a barely visible desktop (or whatever) mouse arrow turns to a black square and another opportunity to see if I've worn-out the reset button yet.
I'm hoping the following system is up to the task:
1024x768@16 or 32bit depth
85Hz Vsync locked and unlocked
NOT OVERCLOCKED
Win98SE
June retail Descent3 up to V1.1
PIII 500 on an ABIT BX6-R2
256M ECC SDRAM
Mitsubishi 900u 19"
Yamaha 4416S CDRW
Adaptec 2940AU SCSI Controller
Western Digital Expert 18G HDD 7200RPM (2 partitions), IBM Deskstar 10G HDD 7200RPM
AOPEN 40X CDROM, Toshiba 32X CDROM
DLINK DFE-530 10/100 NIC
SB Live PRO using Liveware 2.0 drivers, can't seem to load 2.1.
Motorola VoiceSurfer V90 56K(26.4K) Ext. Modem
Panther XL stick, worthless in D3
Cyberman 2 controller, worthless in D3
Logitech USB FF Wheel, I don't use it in D3

I will HUGELY appreciate any advice, TIA

Peter Watson

[Nuno]

You can´t delete Opengl32.dll in \windows\system. OpenGl32.dll, g400icd.dll and glu32.dll (hope you didn´t mess with that one too) are needed for opengl hardware aceleration to work. Reinstall the original windows opengl32.dll.

Bumpmapping doesn´t work under opengl. It´s a directx feature.

Descent3 OpenGL implementation is poor, D3D has EMBM, so why use OGL?

[burre burrito]

i have played Descent 3 with the latest patch, and i got the color-thingy thing, so i swithced to D3D instead. it rocks, but i get problems with textures that i can look right thru, and see the texture beneath! what is wrong? i get it in certaion angles, and it looks kinda like when you dont have correct "gl_polyoffset" in Half-Life, but not as flickery. please help!

[Morbid]

I'm having the problem with wierd texture transparanting too. Only I have a G200. I don't even attempt to run D3 in OpenGL though.
I wish I knew how to solve this problem, because it is damned annoying. But I don't. My guess is that there is something in particular that D3 does that makes a texture bug in the matrox drivers really apparent. I only need point out the bull that G400 users have to put up with in Starsiege Tribes to make my point about Gx00 drivers and texutre managment.

Here's hoping Matrox work this out, but I'll have played through the whole game by then...

-Morbid