Why is Ghost of Tsushima loading slow on ASRock H310CM-HDV?

Island transitions felt painfully slow, breaking the open-world flow. Replacing the drive was too expensive. I used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase the queue from 32 to 256. CrystalDiskMark showed the 4K random read speed jumping from 80MB/s to 220MB/s, while sequential reads held steady at 3500MB/s.