Generally Awful Framerate

Hey guys!
Have to say, I enjoy playing this game a lot. But playing it on PC has become a nightmare. I don't understand why, but for some strange reason, my computer can't seem to play the game properly at all. I somehow managed to get past Seath despite his damned crystals always slowing my game way down, I've killed the Four Kings, and now that I am doing Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, I can't take it much more. It keeps on kicking me out of the game for insufficient frame rate. I've DSFix, and have played around with the settings, but nothing seems to fix it. I want to get my PC repasted to fix the heat issues it's getting, but that's going to be a ways off. IS there something I've overlooked that might be the issue? It's really getting on my nerves now...

Edit: Specs!
8 GB Ram
Nvidia GT435m
i7-Q740 at 1.73GHz

How many fps are you getting? The game has a fps cap of 30, so maybe if you've just come from playing another game it might seem really slow. Otherwise, don't really know what might be causing it, sorry.

Also, I see this is your 1st post so welcome to the forums

Nah, I've played DS before, and it's getting worse framerate on my PC than on my Xbox. I've half fixed the problem, using DSFix to only fix the scaling issue. If I add anything else, the game just dies. It's probably my hard drive; I read the game doesn't like slow drives. Thank you, though!

I stopped using DSfix because of massive frame rate drops. The new version doesn't work as well as 1.5 IMO.

I'm not having any issues with DSfix at maximum quality settings and 1080p resolution.

Some of the DSfix settings require a lot of CPU power. If your CPU is at 1.7 Ghz that may not be enough.

Ikeruga, I have a PC with similar specs to yours, 2 less GB of ram though, and I've had a game-killing framerate problem. I bought the PC version on day 1, played it up to Blighttown, and then left it alone for a couple days because I was getting into Guild Wars 2 around that same time.

I hadn't updated gfx drivers in months and GW2 performance was mediocre (dks was 25-30fps, gw2 was 15-20) so I decided to get the latest drivers. From that moment Dks hasn't run above 15 fps. I've spent hours, probably days worth of time troubleshooting, I have no idea what happened. Maybe my PC is just dying, I don't know ... but there's no reason Dks should be performing so poorly. I can still play other games with playable frame rates, even though I don't have many recent PC games to put my rig to the test.

It's been very disheartening, and I was never able to get to the Artorias content. After fighting Quelaag at 6-8 fps I've hung up the PC version for good. Wish I could take that $40 back and put it toward the console DLC.

Sounds so unfair that you guys get troubles with the game with quite a nice HW setup... I used to start plaing the game on my GF 8800GS, before I upgraded to 5770x2... No difference. Totally. Yeah, I get 40FPS in Crysis, but cmon - no freakin difference in DkS...

Just give it a try with using/not using DSFix. Changing resolution to a smaller one, turning off all the goodies, like skipping intros, or even getting someone's pre-set INI file. Also consider trying not the latest version of DSFix, but older ones.
Also, you could find helpful downgrading your VGA drivers to prior version, or even checking out for DirectX uodates %)

I don't know about the OP, but I've tried everything you could possibly imagine short of formatting my computer. I've tried every individual driver Nvidia released in 2012. With and without dsfix, lowest settings, highest settings, etc. You get the picture.

Still, it's nice to read a word of consolation from a stranger rather than the usual "Lawl it works 4 me."

I guess I post mine as I have no problems so long as DSFix isn't used.

AMD Athlon X4 645
4 GB of RAM (I'm using XP still lol)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 220
Everything is current driver wise.

It's nothing special, especially the GPU and RAM.

I'm not sure, but I think Nvidia has a switch for CPU/GPU processing priorities. Maybe you should try playing around with them