For some reason MTW and VI is barely playable on my system which ran even the largest battles in Shogun very well.

Here are my specs:
Pentium 4 1.5ghz
384mb PC-600 RDRAM
GeForce 3 Ti200 128mb
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
WinXP Pro SP1
DirectX 9.0b

I tried fiddling with the agp settings and the hardware mixing option in the game but the only battles I can play are the ones with really small numbers of troops and even those seem to pause every few seconds. The Battle of Stirling for example, is unbearably slow. Shouldn't my system be able to play it nicely? I mean supposedly you only need a Pentium II 350mhz with 128mb RAM. Or is it because my sound card is not built for DirectX 9? That's the only other thing I can think of.

Thanks in advance