in the .ini there should be a line that sais MinDesiredFramerate=something.
The game tries to reduce details until it can achieve that framerate. For example some people can't see blood splatters because the game removes them for that MinDesiredFramerate. I have never heard of an occurence where the draw distances were reduced, but maybe that's the case here.
If you have precaching set to false in every case, the game might load stuff that it needs dynamically while you are already playing. After the first round is over you have seen everything there is so maybe then everything is loaded as if precaching was set to true and there is no dynamic afterlaoding anymore, which means in turn, that you might get more stable framerate, which in turn means, the MinDesiredFramerate setting allows you to look farther.
This is all just a theory and as I said, that setting never altered view-distances before to my knowledge, but it might be worth a try to set it to 0 (which is basically switching it off).