It looks like this is the main issue causing many of the graphical issues. There appears to be no support for SLI written into Hunted. I turned off SLI and was able to set World Detail to the highest setting without the black boxes showing up from motion blur. This also fixed the frequent graphical lockups and cut scene freezes. Based on other posts I'm going to say this is also an issue with Crossfire ATI cards. This still svcks as you'll have to re-enable SLI for your other games, but disabling it for Hunted helped a lot... Hope this helps others having issues!
Edit: this wasn't the fix all I was hoping for... after playing longer the game still locks, frame rates drop to below 5 fps at times... but it did help overall... just didn't fix the problem, only made it better... kinda