I'm seeing high read latency and slow scene transitions in Kai no Kiseki on my Kioxia Exceria Pro 2TB; should I lock the link speed?

Whenever I was traveling through the massive world of the Trails series, the flow would be ruined by these agonizingly long loading screens, which was just frustrating. The data showed the Kioxia Exceria Pro 2TB's PCIe 4.0 link was flapping between Gen3 and Gen4 in 'Auto' mode, causing random read performance to bounce between 40GB/s and 60GB/s. I first tried updating the storage drivers, but it only shaved off 0.8 seconds—basically useless. I went back into the BIOS, forced the M.2 slot to Gen4, and switched my power plan to 'Ultimate Performance'. CrystalDiskMark then showed sequential reads locking in at 7000-7200MB/s, and scene transitions dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds. I did have a couple of cold boot issues where the drive wasn't detected after locking Gen4, but clearing the CMOS sorted it out. Drive temps are now 48-55℃ with a very smooth read curve. Contrast tests prove the load speeds are way better, and temps stay between 42-55℃.