Is my ASRock Z370M Pro4 causing slow loads in FF7 Rebirth?
Seeing the loading bar fly by and scenes pop open instantly was such a relief. I had the game installed on an old SATA SSD, and the ASRock Z370M Pro4's SATA 3 interface was hitting a massive IO bottleneck during asset-heavy loads, taking up to 45 seconds. I wasted time trying disk defragmentation software, which only shaved off 2 seconds—totally useless. I finally migrated the game to an M.2 NVMe drive, set the slot to Gen 3 in the BIOS, and updated the chipset drivers. The loading times plummeted from 45 seconds to just 12 seconds. I did run into a partition table error during the move that stopped the drive from booting, but reformatting to GPT fixed it. The SSD stayed cool at 42-50℃. I switched the storage mode from 'Compatible' to 'High Performance' in the board utility, and now my frame times are a stable 5.1-6.4ms.
