Glide or OpenGl or D3D?

Are there effects exclusive to Glide? OpenGL seems fine to me, even reflections are present on the bridge.

Got the latest .77i patch.

Not a clue. I just the default, whatever that is. I have the high resolution texture packs installed too.

Well you can only use glide if you have a 3dfx card installed which I imagine is quite unlikely.

Usually I just use OpenGL or DirectX9, whichever works best at the time I wanted to play.

I use openGL, DX9 seems a little wonky for me

If running 227i community patch: Use OpenGL. It's the main focus of development in that patch, and traces it's roots back to the excellent UTGLR renderer. The enhanced D3D9 renderer is still pretty good, and should be used instead of kentie.net D3D10 with 227i if OpenGL is not working for you, for some reason.

If running 226 and willing to install a third party renderer, use kentie.net D3D10. It supports all features, has no known bugs and displays a "correct" image on all graphics cards.

If you want a "fully vanilla" renderer, use a glide wrapper (nGlide is good) and run with the Glide renderer.

In vanilla Unreal Gold, the Direct3D renderer still has many graphical glitches and missing features--masked textures are often displayed incorrectly, the game may run too fast on modern CPUs, skies lack multitexture effects and uses OneXBlending resulting in a darker, muddier look to the game compared to other renderers. In short--avoid.

Same goes for the stock OpenGL renderer, it's missing features and incredibly buggy (in fact it may simply crash if you select it)

Is there any way I can run this game with a glide wrapper (nglide) at a widrescreen resolution with a perfect non-stretched picture? I haven't managed to get that so far.

You can set nGlide to your desired widescreen resolution, then open up the Unreal console and type
setdesiredfov 105

The change can be made permanent in the User.ini config file under "desiredfov"

The HUD will still be stretched, however. That's as good as you're going to get with Glide.