How to fix I/O blocking on Intel 760P 512GB storage?
Whenever I explore open areas, the asset loading speed just falls off a cliff, causing my frame rate to swing wildly between 60 FPS and 15 FPS. The QLC NAND on the Intel 760P 512GB is the culprit; once the cache is tapped out, sequential write speeds plummet from 300MB/s to a pathetic 80MB/s, which creates this unbearable input lag. I initially tried running a defrag, which was a total waste of time and actually spiked the write amplification, leaving me pretty frustrated. I eventually dove into Device Manager and bumped the NVMe controller queue depth from the default 32 up to 64, while simultaneously forcing the write cache flush in the registry. In CrystalDiskMark, my 4K random reads climbed from 42-50MB/s to 65-72MB/s, and frame times finally tightened up to 16-22ms. Interestingly, right after the first tweak, I noticed a weird drive detection delay during boot, but that vanished once I switched my power plan to High Performance. Temps stayed around 40-52℃ with a much smoother read/write curve. Confirmed the resource scheduling is actually working now.
