Mass Effect feels sluggish and drops frames during star map transitions on my MSI A520M-A PRO, do I need to optimize scheduling?

Every time the ship jumps to a new system, the loading bar just hangs at 80%, which is a total buzzkill. Looking at the data, the I/O bus on the MSI A520M-A PRO was hitting wait times of 160-210ms with modern titles. I tried dropping the game to lowest settings, but the load times didn't budge and the graphics looked like a mosaic—it was like putting tractor wheels on a Ferrari. I eventually used a scheduling tool to set the game's disk priority to 'Realtime' and disabled Windows Defender's real-time scanning. In Resource Monitor, disk active time dropped from 95% to 72%, and load times went from 30 seconds down to 12. I did get a system security warning when I first disabled the scan, but adding the game folder to the whitelist shut that up. Board temps are between 42-50℃ with CPU load around 80%. I checked the performance curves and I/O efficiency is up 35%, while GPU temps stay at 62-68℃.