Hello,
as you all know Diablo II (especially MXL) can stutter like crazy if you have the game's audio enabled.
The parameter "-ns" resolves this issue entirely, however I really wanted to have audio so I tried to look for a solution.
After fruitlessly trying a couple of DirectSound wrappers and all of their settings I decided to take a look at the Sounds.txt and bingo.
When you change all the values in the "Stream" column from 0 to 1 on every sound in the Sounds.txt and put it back into the MXL MPQ the stutters are completely gone.
Before:
After:
I was able to replicate it consistently. The stutters are simply gone entirely. I assume this also works for vanilla D2 and Path of Diablo etc. by modifying their respective MPQ files as well.
Here's a link to a modified MXL.mpq (2.2.8) file if you want to test it yourself. Make sure you back yours up first and start the game through Game.exe and not the MXL Launcher since it'll just replace it again. I'm guessing you also don't wanna go into the online multiplayer with a modified MPQ file.
Hopefully this works for everyone and can be implemented into the next update natively if it does.