On one of my Windows 98 systems (specs below), Quake III suffers from intermittent stuttering. Every so often, the game pauses for a split second, then continues normally. Pauses can be anywhere from three to thirty seconds apart, and seem to occur more frequently in some maps than others. It's not a game-breaking problem, at least not for single player, but it is annoying.

I originally assumed the video card was the problem, but I've been testing other cards on this system and Quake III has the same problem on all of them. After reading this post on the Rage3D forums, I tried disabling music (s_musicvolume 0), and the stuttering went away. That suggests the sound card is to blame, but since I don't have any sound-related problems in other games, I'm reluctant to replace it.

I did try playing with some other Quake III console variables like com_soundMegs, s_mixahead, and s_mixPreStep, but these didn't seem to make any difference. Has anyone else encountered this problem and discovered a better solution than just disabling music?

Dell Dimension 4100
Intel 815e chipset
Pentium III 1.0 GHz
256 MB PC-133 RAM
20 GB 7200 RPM IDE hard drive
Sound Blaster Audio PCI 64 (Dell OEM)
GeForce2 GTS

Using Forceware 45.23 and Creative's latest Sound Blaster PCI128 drivers (work with all ES1371/1373 chips).

Quake III is patched to version 1.32.