I have a friend who could play the alpha flawlessly but now cannot play beta because the game is super choppy for him, even with all graphics details on minimum. Hes got a GT540 and a quad core cpu at 3.2. Any advice would be great.

Tell him to go into the Graphics settings and set it to 1280x720, switch to low settings, turn AA to FXAA, and hope for the best. That card is borderline useless for C3.

The only GT 540 part is the GT 540m, which is a laptop GPU. Does he have a desktop or a laptop? It's also well under Crytek's minimum specs. I'd try to overclock the card, get another 100mhz-150mhz out of it if you can; and play at a low resolution. He won't be able to run it at his native res, he'll have to drop it a lot. Don't use any AA.

You can create a system.cfg file and set all of the CVars to either off or as low as possible. I think the in-game settings when on low will probably set everything to the bare minimum though.