I know exactly what you’re talking about with the “pauses”, it even crashed my machine a few times.
it also seems like it ran better on higher settings, towards the beginning of the game, but once you get so far… you really need to back it down alot (was playing @ 1680 x1050 fine, but then had to bring it down to 1440x900 along with some of the detail settings)
great game though… epic ending IMO