Bozon...I was playing with a GEForce 2 32 mb card until last night. AHII had disappointing frame rates and I got a lot of the freezes you mention. Last night I installed a Radeon 9600 XT (128 mb) card. Frame rates drastically improved, but I still got freezes...just as I was about to nail some one. After the freeze cleared (maybe 2 -5 seconds), he was right behind me and nailed me.
So I would say the freezes are not only due to your vid card, but you will see much improved frame rates with a better card. It was certainly worth it to me to updgrade, which I did specifically for AHII. After the great play in AHI, I wouldn't have been satisfied with the performance from my old GeForce 2 card in AHII. It would have made the game almost uplayable, but you might want to wait until AHII goes live and the bugs are mostly fixed.