Fixing Ryzen 7 9700X disk scheduling in MS Flight Simulator 2024
Flying over Manhattan was a mess; the loading bar would just hang at 60%, and the stuttering was unbearable. I looked into it and found the I/O bus on the Ryzen 7 9700X was struggling with 4K assets, with wait times hitting 170-230ms. I tried dropping the graphics to the absolute minimum, but the load times didn't budge and the game looked like a pixelated mess. It felt like putting tractor wheels on a Ferrari. I eventually used a process scheduler to set the game's disk priority to 'Realtime' and disabled Windows Defender's real-time scanning for the game folder. In Resource Monitor, disk active time dropped from 96% to 78%, and map loads went from 45 seconds down to 18. I had to deal with some annoying security warnings after disabling the scan, but adding the folder to the whitelist fixed it. The motherboard stays at 40-50℃ and CPU load is around 80%. The performance curve shows a 35% jump in I/O efficiency.
