Qemu 1.5.2 mouse jerky movement/sound choppy [SOLVED]

[Anon-E-moose]

Qemu 1.4.2 works fine, but with 1.5.2 (any release) the mouse is extremely jerky w/lots of pauses, almost unusable.
The sound is extremely choppy.

I wanted to use 1.5.2 because it solves a passthrough problem with my nvidia 9500gt card.

Has anyone else seen odd behavior from the mouse with 1.5.*?

If I downgrade everything works fine, but then I lose the x-vga options that I need.

Thanks for any replies

Edit to add: seems adding an "-sdl" flag makes the mouse work properly and sound works better though not perfect, gonna mark this solved.
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Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 4.11.7-zen, glibc-2.21, gcc-4.9.4, eudev
xorg-server-1.19.5 w/mesa-17.2.8, openbox, nouveau and radeon, oss4(2017)