Demon's Souls [BLES00932]

finally got around to downloading this and while it runs, it has bad performance drops but glad to see the progress.

my current specs are as follows:
Windows 7 pro 64-bit
AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0ghz
Sapphire Radeon R9 280
16gb ddr3 RAM

for reference I have it capped at 30 fps

In the tutorial area it stays at 28-30 fps while standing still at the start, running to the first enemy it drops to 10-11 fps. Once on land it will smooth out to 25-28 fps once the water stops rippling, the enemy doesn't seem to effect performance. The main source of lag seems to be coming from physics, anytime I roll into or attack breakable objects (i.e. barrels, crates, etc.) my fps will drop to about 5-7 fps. Spinning the camera rather quickly causes slight hang-ups and micro-stutters (noticed when fishing for back stabs on the 2 blue eyed knights before the Vanguard [1st] boss fight). Finally, I reached the boss fight with about 19-23 fps, landed a couple swings on him and got the obligatory one hit kill from him, you died screen, fade to black and it crashed, giving an error which I stupidly forgot to write down or copy. So I set out to replicate it and didn't get the error so it went on to the nexus cut-scene which lagged out hard with 6-12 fps for the duration with 30ish fps when there wasn't a bright flashing light, fast forward to the end and my AMD display driver crashed and the game froze at a white screen.

If there's a way to acquire the error from a log or something let me know and I'll find it for you

And if you need further system specs or rpcs3 settings let me know

The log is in the main RPCS3 folder, it's hard to say if that performance is normal or not because FX CPUs typically don't do very well with RPCS3 and I don't know your settnigs (settings are also listed in the log file). Just look for a file called RPCS3.log.gz after you experience an error and close the emulator down post it somewhere or re-name it. If you boot up the emulator again and play a different game it will over-write the old log file.

For that hardware I would use the following settings:
CPU TAB:
PPU/SPU Decoders set to recompiler.
Leave firmware settings alone.
Enable Loop detection
Preferred SPU threads = 2-4 (try each option figure out what's best for DeS) most people say 3/4 for that game.

GPU TAB:
Write color buffers on
Renderer: Vulkan
GPU Texture scaling can be left on although it doesn't do anything for vulkan currently
Resolution: 1280x720 (1920x1080 isn't supported by DeS)
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Framelimiter: OFF (DeS caps FPS anyway and this hurts FPS)
Leave the other checkboxes OFF.

I would make sure your GPU drivers are up to date as well.