As far as I can see from the box art, the game minimally requires a PII 400 and in fact recommends a PIII 800 so it is not really that surprising. Try it on a faster computer.

I looked up the requirements and saw it required a 400mhz, so your right its not crazy it pegs my cpu, min requirements have always bull. IDK if you have seen the game, its not graphically impressive.. im surprised i can run unreal in software rendering at 800x600 and it is smooth, but petz5 just crushes my machine.

That's how things were. Petz 5 released far later, adds a bunch of things, etc. in a dell dude p4 dimension world of 2002, when Sims expansions were already choking a bunch of celeron PCs. It wasn't even pf magic anymore by this point. When Unreal came out, it was just Petz 2 at best, which was just Petz with more modular capabilites for addon breedz and toyz - it hasn't done the scope bloat yet.

They could probably have made the game run on slower hardware if they spent more time optimising, but they didn't need to so they didn't