Optimizing Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB for Dune: Awakening
Seeing 4K textures snap into place instantly is an incredible feeling! The Samsung 9100 PRO has insane PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, but on 'Auto' settings, it occasionally drops back to PCIe 4.0, causing texture load delays of 15-28ms and ugly blur blocks. I tried lowering the texture quality in-game, but it looked like a game from ten years ago, which was just depressing. I went into the BIOS and forced the PCIe link to Gen5 mode and updated the NVMe drivers. Using a performance analyzer, the sequential reads stayed locked at 10000-12000MB/s, and the pop-in vanished. The only catch was that the PC took way longer to boot after locking Gen5, but disabling 'Fast Boot' in BIOS solved that. The drive runs hot, around 58-65℃, but the heatsink is doing its job. Everything is finally buttery smooth at max settings.
