Help reduce Crysis 3 CPU load

I have an i3-2100 and a GTX 660. I'm playing Crysis 3 on High + tessellation and POM at 1920x1200 and I'm getting just under 40fps average. The problem is the drops to 20fps or so. The game really slows down and I get some seriously long frametimes in a bunch - usually when looking at a large view with a lot of grass.

So I've dropped the viewdistratio commands down to half (50 for each) and dropped the dynamic-grass-distance to half (4) and that helps a lot, but I'm still getting drops to 22-27fps every so often (running through Welcome to the Jungle - level 2).

Even turning the dynamic grass off doesn't alleviate all the choppiness... ...calculating the wind physics on all that grass seems to be extremely CPU-intensive. My GPU usage almost always stays below 100% (usually 80-90%) so I know it's not the problem.

The rest of my specs are in my sig. Any tips on lowering the CPU-load through commands or in-game settings?
 
Solution
Your processor and graphics card are not powerful enough to play crysis 3 on high, some systems with a gtx 770 find it hard on high.
Try lowering the texture quality to low or medium or change the resolution to 1280 x 720.
Resolution makes a big difference but obviously decreases quality.

Tormentor98

Honorable
Jul 3, 2013
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10,660
Your processor and graphics card are not powerful enough to play crysis 3 on high, some systems with a gtx 770 find it hard on high.
Try lowering the texture quality to low or medium or change the resolution to 1280 x 720.
Resolution makes a big difference but obviously decreases quality.
 
Solution
Keep in mind I'm shooting for 30-40fps and I'm using SMAAx2. Changing the resolution lower boosts my average framerate yes, but it still drops to the same mid-twenties in certain parts of the map. Texture quality is not an issue, since it never hits 1500MB on my 2GB card.

(I've been reading all day and it seems there are parts of the first two levels that have some seriously unoptimized physics for the ropes and grass, so maybe I should be pleased my $800 system is doing as well as it is.) I'd love to eliminate as many drops below 30fps as possible through cvars in my Autoexec.cfg.

Any Crysis 3 tweakers in the house?