Spotted by MaLDo, the creator of MaLDoHD for Crysis 2, it seems that the key to the performance issues that have been bothering Crysis 3 players has finally been discovered. According to MaLDo there are a variety of issues that could easily be resolved should the developers choose to do so. Some examples can be seen from the quote below:

"I have also seen that the SLI profile in NVidia beta drivers that considerably improved performance for the multiplayer beta, does not perform as well in the final game. It's far better using 0x0C0320F5 value (at least in my case). I've been testing with unlocked cvars but did not draw anything conclusive. It is unfortunate that only a few are unlocked and although I could make the game detects a mod folder, it doesn't use the presets inside the "mods\modname\c3\CVarGroups" folder."

Furthermore, he has shown conclusive evidence that the issues causing the tremendous drop in FPS is the presence of moving ropes, as evidenced through a series of screenshots with varying FPS. Thanks for the expert sleuthing - now all that's left is for Crytek to get around to fixing it.