I have a 3Ghz dual core, Geforce 6800, 2Gigs of RAM and I've never had any slow-downs except at the very beginning of a map for a few seconds.
I'd suggest right-clicking on your desktop and going to your NVIDIA Control Panel. Go to MANAGE 3D SETTINGS and look through that list and do some tweaking. I have quite a few gamer friends and they always neglect to check these settings when they have some graphic card issues.
This control panel lets you directly control the settings ON THE GRAPHIC CARD before the game gets it's chance to use the graphic card. Anything you set here will override in-game settings (for most games).
for me, the setting which will most affect frame rates is anti-aliasing. if you're using anything above 4x, just take it down to 4x..you really won't notice a difference. If the problem is affecting gameplay so much that you can't stand it, take anti-aliasing OFF, and I promise that it'll run A LOT faster. (but the edges of objects will be jaggy).
I've never really had to tweak my card for this game, so maybe someone else can chime in and say if your GPU will override in-game settings with this method.