Serious stuttering in firefights

[hollowpoint]

the game starts to stutter very badly during most shoot-outs which sometimes can be severe enough to render the game unplayable. otherwise, it runs smoothly. i have an atlon 900mhz w/ 3Dnow, 128mb of ram, a geforce3 with 64mb of memory, latest drivers for everything. all background stuff turned off except for explorer, systray, and directCD. help.....please.