MESA RUNing Like a DoG

Hi my names Cliff.
I have a 400 p2 celeron mmx, with 160meg of ram, voodoo3 2000 pci, 16 meg on voodoo3, and i have allowed 400 meg of my hard drive in swap space.
Now my problem.
I have had a problem now for ever on end, i have run debain 2.2, mandrake 7.1, redhat 6.1, and now i am running Redhat 7.0, help me
when i look at demos of what mesa can do they run slow
i tried to run a demo of sin today under redhat 7 and tried to put it in default opengl from software renderer mode it ran so slow then i changed back to software mode works fine, graphics are shiot but it runs fine, which leads me to believe that i have a huge problem and maybe i need extra libraires, cause i could never get quake2 working with opengl, still can’t, i need a solution there to so if any one can help with getting quake2 to run i would be most grateful.
Unreal tournament ran pretty ok on glide, i try to swtich to mesa rendering (or opengl mode)
runs slow as a dog…
please help me !!!