I don't know what nvidia did to the latest driver but for some reason the above combination looks, a difference of night and day, better.
(the realist in me says they probably just did some sort of playing around with gamma correction )
Also, there were a few minor crash issues in 460.89 that seem to be solved in 461.40 for the above combination.
I know when I used nglide to run D3 that for whatever reason mipmaps/bilinear filtering wouldn't work which makes distant textures turn into static and look horrible (technical term for it is "temporal aliasing"). The only way to fix it is to go into the nvidia driver and force a global anisotropic filter override so everything gets filtered and it makes the game look 200% better. You just have to remember to turn it off again because most games that are newer than 10-15 years old already use anisotropic filtering but likely customized to their particular implementation and the global override may be less than optimal for them.
Still, using nglide and running D3 in glide mode is pretty much the best way to run it on modern systems. Set up your resolution and aspect in nglide and it overrides/blocks all of D3s dump mode switches (because all of D3's menus/automap are hard coded to 640x480) and keeps the game running at whatever resolution you set pretty much perfectly at all times. Only thing that gets a little clunky is text/reticle rendering if the resolution in D3 doesn't match the resolution in nglide but it is pretty minor and doesn't impact gameplay at all.
Maybe the new driver is forcing 32bits colors, which would make a huge difference in case it didn't work before. I don't now about glide, but it never worked in opengl and in direct3d if it worked at all the setting didn't get saved.
Thankfully there is a version of the D3 executable where someone switched one byte from 16 to 32 fixing the problem at least for opengl, maybe also for other modes. With 32bit colors the -z32bit command line option also starts working, which reduces artifacts around overlapping polygons.
Using that I'm quite happy with the graphics quality, although it would be nice not having the resolution change for the menu. Last time I tried nglide the result was bad, but that was a long time ago, maybe I'll try again.
)
