Usually this is a lame excuse for people sucking in multiplayer matches, but with D2X-XL it mainly struck during single player games, caused by textures being loaded on-the-fly in-game. I had worked on this a lot in the past, trying to preload all required textures, but on certain occasions D2X-XL was still freezing for half a second - just enough to make your ship go spinning wildly and miss the robot you just tried to hit before it could hit you.

I had the suspicion that the reason must still have something to do with texture loads, but I just couldn't figure where - until today. I found out that some preloaded textures got kicked out of memory when the graphics system was reset to a clean state during level load. A second reason was that 3D powerups were converted from their original sprite appearance on-the-fly when first rendered, causing texture loads as well. Fixing this behaviour was peanuts, and finally rids us (or at least me) from this infamous stuttering so often costing me precious shield points in critical game situations. Yay!