Decent laptop unable to smoothly play anything.

Processor - Intel core TM i7-3537U 2Ghz
Os - Windows 8 64bit
Display - 1920 x 1080
Graphics - NVIDIA GEFORCE GT735M 2GB
Ram - 12GB 1600 MTS DDR3L-SDRAM
Storage - 256gb SATA FLASH SSD ( I sometimes run games from my USB 3.0 hard drive - not sure if that would effect speed that much though. )

I've been told/shown that machines with this spec should be able to play semi decent and semi new games on "ultra" and I can't run bioshock infinite on low detail, dark souls (cannot be played with lag) along with other games that just lag far too much to be enjoyed.. Little bit confused to whether something's not being utilised or just the fact I've bought a sony vaio when I shouldn't of haha. Any info would be appreciated guys,
Cheers.

Install latest drivers, Direct X.

You should run games on about high - med graphics.

If you didn't buy a used laptop then you should contact the seller and get a raplacement if updating drivers won't work.

The CPU is fairly weak. I'd say you should probably be able to run games at medium.

Perhaps, the GT735m is underpowered for gaming at 1080p.

My ASUS G46VW has a weaker CPU: i5 3230Q (2.6-3.2 Ghz dualcore with hyperthreading), a 2Gb Nvidia GTX 660m/Intel HD4000, and 8Gb DDR3. The resolution of the ASUS LCD screen is only 1366x768 which combined with the GTX 660m, is enough to run Crysis 3 decently at Medium Textures with High details.

It can for sure run games but more on the low to medium settings no anti aliasing or extra bells and whistles at 720 or lower. Go to the nvidia control panel by right clicking your desktop then go to 3d settings and change the settings in it to what I have shown. See if that changes a anything also. Turn all anti aliasing and other effects like phsyx and so forth off. Never use supper sampling or ubber sampling or resolution scale, your card can't handle it. I'd say stay away from vsinc as well. Your computer isn't bad but it for sure isn't great. It's not really meant for games, it can do them but clearly wasn't built for them as a main selling point of the machine. The processor and gpu are a little on the weak side but if you lower your expectations to low/medium with the bells and wistles off you'll be able to play most games and a huge library of old games that would run perfect.

(You have windows 8 so getting to the nvidia control panel might be different then in windows 7 and how i described)

Ambient occlusion-off

Anisotropic filtering-application controlled

Antiaaliasing FXAA- off

Antialiasing gamma correction- on

Antialiasing mode - Application controlled

Antialiasing settings- Application controlled

Antialiasing transparency - off

CUDA GPUs- All

Maximum pre rendered frames- 1

Multi-display/mixed-gpu acceleration - single display performance mode (unless you have more then one screen)

Power management mode - Prefer maximum performance

Texture filtering anisotropic sample option- off

Texture filtering negative LOD bias - Allow

Texture quality- High performance

Texture filtering trilinear optimization- On

Threaded optimization- Auto

Tripple buffering- off

Vertical sync- Use 3d application setting

Change those settings then come back and tell me if it has or hasn't made a difference. Also don't forget a lot of those laptops come with a shitload of junk software that will often be running in the background for no reason taking up valuable processing power from your all ready weak cpu. Look up what's useless and not needed either stop it from functioning and starting up all together or close unneeded applications and programs when you wish to play games. Another thing I found worked on weak machines was switching in the task manager how high on the priority the program was. Simply right click the game in task manager and go to priority and switch to high.

Also running games off a slow external harddrive does make a difference. If your hard-drive is slow your games run slow.

Make sure your discrete GPU is set to run games by default if you also have an integrated GPU. Occasionally on my laptop the integrated GPU will try to run games.

If that doesn't work and your drivers are updated try lowering the resolution.

Whoever told you a 735M is good for ultra settings at 1080p is on another planet.

You'll want low-medium settings, especially if you want to run at native res.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphic-Cards.13849.0.html

My 750m barely runs medium-high settings on 1080p. You shouldn't expect anything higher than medium on 720p resolution from 735m. For ultra in full HD you'd need one of those briefcase sized laptops equipped with dual 780m's or similar for the latest games.

A site I like for researching laptop GPU specs:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-735M.90246.0.html

You'll have to lower the game screen resolution. For the Vaio's 15.5" screen, the upscaling shouldn't be that bad. If you were playing a game on a PC monitor of the same size, the screen res would probably be around 1366x768.

1366x768 is the native res of my 14" ASUS laptop. I could've bought one that had a native res of 1600x900. But, I chose to stick with the lower res 1366x768 LCD. I didn't see the point of the higher res. That's just more GPU usage for less return. I probably won't see much difference because of the small screen.