RTCW GOY - Map & sound stutter every 10 seconds!

[heftigrat]

Well, I finally got Return to Castle Wolfenstein - Game of the Year edition running in Breezy by:

1. Installing the legacy Nvidia drivers and changing the graphics card driver in xorg.conf from "nv" to "nvidia".
2. kill-ing artsd so that it wouldn't monopolize the sound system.
3. chown-ing the /home/non-root-user/.wolf path from root to non-root.

But now I have this problem where every 10-12 seconds or so the map & sound stutter for a second, which obviously hampers my gameplay. It doesn't seem to be anything performance related, as it is at very regular intervals. You can almost time them with a stopwatch (hey, there's an idea I might try). Can anyone think of any app or daemon that runs in the background by default that might make this happen? has anyone else had this problem? Thanks all!

[heftigrat]

P.S. I'm a Kubuntu freak, but the user base in that particular forum seems kinda slim compared to this one. That, and I'm not sure the issue is desktop-specific. I'm undecided about the following question:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=85607
Some seasoned Ubuntu users have already posted, though the issue seems rather split. Anywho...

[Jenga]

This sounds like a 3ddesktop stutter. If you use 3ddesktop, this is almost certainly why. It refreshes your desktops every ~10 seconds, which momentarily hogs your video bandwidth.

[heftigrat]

Thanks for the suggestion, but 3ddesktop isn't even installed.

[heftigrat]

Well, xfce is the *****. I remembered seeing someone post that he/she only plays FPS's in xfce, so I gave that a try and viola! Perfectly smooth gameplay. Must be KDE specific, my apologies all for posting in the Gnome forum.