I'm trying to optimize my PC game but I can find the bottleneck since every time I run it through a profiler (gDEBugger) it runs smooths. When running outside gDEBugger I get these annoying hiccups. It's not just the graphics, the sound also gets choppy. The drops are inconsistent across runs, i.e, sometimes I run the same scenario and get no drops at all, sometimes I get a few drops, and others the game is consistently slow. The only constant is: when running through gDEBugger I ALWAYS get a smooth run.

I'm suspecting something outside my game is interfering and causing these drops, but what in the hell does gDEBugger do that nullifies these drops? A higher process priority? Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.