Reading Z-buffer informations during rasterization

(First I want you to excuse me for my poor english …)

I’m working on GeForce3 …
I want to find an opengl function which permit to take the Z-buffer values during the scene rendering … at the moment, the solution I have found is:
Between two declarations of polygons(part of a surface of an object), I practice a glReadBuffer on the DephtBuffer … but this solution forces me to declare the polygons of my objects one by one ! (no use of glut or List to create objects …) what is not interesting, because of the time I loose !
So, on the Opengl rendering method, all the depht values are evaluated and comparated to the buffer’s one … how can we take back an information of this change ??? (That should be a solution …) …
An other solution I have tried is to use the FeedBack, but to have a fine description, I need to create clipping planes near of my focus point … but it use a lot of time to give sub-polygon vertexs …
Does anybody have an idea ??
Thanks for your feedback !