I have a GeForce 4 TI4600 and I'm running RH9.. 3d games are sluggish, and i'm guessing its because I cannot check "Enable Hardware 3D Acceleration" under the display settings..

How do I do enable it?

did you install the nvidia drivers? did you change the xf86config settings?

well after reading around, i probably dont have the latest nvid drivers.. but

How do I just quit X, and get to where i can run the nvidia .run?

and what do you mean, editing the x86config?

To install the driver you must run it outside of X. Boot up linux with runlevel 3 (default is 5 - which loads up X automatically).
Set the runlevel to 3 in the /etc/inittab file. Runlevel 3 will leave at a text login screen. From here you can run your nvidia installer.

After the install you need to edit your x86config file to change some lines, eg 'nv' to 'nvidia' etc. Look at the readme that comes with the installer...

For me in a nutshell the steps for installing Nvidia Linux Drivers (1.0-4349)

1) Got the NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Driver 1.0-4349 (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run) from www.nvidia.com
2) Set the runlevel to 3 in the /etc/inittab file.
3) Checked I had 4.0.1 of XFree86 installed. I had. RedHat 8.1 comes with 4.2.0 apparently (looking at /var/log/XFree86.0.log). The Readme suggests you need at least 4.0.1. I stuck with 4.2.0. There is a 4.3.0 version now available.
4) ran sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run. The installer does everything...
5) next edit /etc/X11/XF86Config to change "nv" to "nvidia" etc as in the readme.
6) startx