Well, if you're CPU limited you should be able to turn up the settings a good bit and still turn out the same frame rates.
Enabling GPU PhysX might help frame rates in that case too.
Your CPU is pretty much as good as AMD gets for gaming...It's probably at least as good as my first gen i5. With a GTX570 I've found framerates passable, with the occasional dip to 20, but mostly in the 30+ region on mostly high settings. I feel like GPU PhysX helped smooth things out...but I don't have anything but a feeling to back that up.
Don't hold out too much hope for Piledriver (partly because I don't think it's going in anything except APUs). It's the next iteration, Steamroller, that maybe fixes things:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/09/06/a...amroller-core/
Of course, Haswell will be around by then. Still ahead by a feature size node and now on a new architecture.