Ok, so I have always had a problem with massive framerate drops, freezes, and rubber banding when playing SK on minimum graphics and transients culled, and just assumed it was the fault of my poor little laptop. I created an alt account because I got bored and installed SK on linux instead of windows, and to my delight I found that everything was smooth! I can run the game on max graphics with 16x antialiasing with render effects on all while being run fullscreen on a 1920x1080p HD external display...and everything runs swimmingly! I havn't had one rubber banding incident, my framerate is at 60FPS, the graphics are GORGEOUS, and there is no delay between my keystrokes and my character's actions. So, the problem wasn't my laptop, it was windows! Sadly for all the steam users out there (my main account included), linux is not an option, however, if you make an alt or use the downloadable/browser client, then I would HIGHLY suggest setting aside a small partition of your hard drive to install linux on so you can have both linux and windows through dual booting. Best part is, Linux is FREE!
tl;dr-Linux runs SK better than windows any day
PC specs:
Manufacturer: Sony
Model: Vaio VPCEH11-FX
OS: Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS 64-bit and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
RAM: 4GB
Processer: Intel Pentium CPU B940 2.00GHz Dual Core
Graphics Card: Intel Integrated Graphics
yeah...these specs are far from phenomenal
Linux does a lot of things better than windows.
One of the major things that windows has over linux is... market share.
Additionally - if you know your ways around linux, you can backdoor getting SK to run in steam. The easiest method is using wine to install window's version of steam on linux.