Well, here are my specs:

Athlon XP 2600+
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB
512MB PC3200 DDR
40 GB HDD

Those are about the only ones that should affect gameplay. Now, even with those, gameplay is at best choppy, and its not lag, its just when I turn around and face, say, the city centre, the whole thing just hits 0.001 FPS and doesn\'t respond for ages.
 If this IS an engine problem, will we see optimizations later to solve this issue?

And also, can anyone tell me what to put in certain CFG files so as to optimize the performance on my machine with these specs. If you can do this, It would be much appreciated

Thanks