Why is my Kioxia EXCERIA PLUS G4 1TB losing textures?
While galloping through the countryside, distant buildings would suddenly turn into blurry blobs, which completely killed the immersion. Looking at the logs, the Kioxia G4 was hitting 2-3 brief PCIe link resets during heavy loads, interrupting the data stream. I first tried lowering the texture quality in-game, but the graphics looked like something from ten years ago, and I wasn't about to settle for that. I downloaded the latest official firmware and changed the PCIe signal strength from 'Auto' to 'Strong' in the BIOS, locking the link speed to Gen 5. In 3DMark storage benchmarks, sequential reads stabilized around 10500MB/s, and the texture popping vanished. I did have a weird issue where the drive had a recognition delay on cold boots after the update, but disabling 'Fast Boot' in the BIOS cleared it up. Temps are sitting at 50-56℃, and the drive feels incredibly responsive. Loading speeds are way up, with temps holding at 50-56℃.
