Why does my Super Mario Emulator stutter on a 144Hz monitor?

I felt completely jarred when slight pauses hit during level transitions on my 144Hz display. I first tried enabling low-latency mode in the drivers, but it caused annoying screen flickering, proving the issue was deep in the scheduling. I then used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase the read queue depth from 32 to 64 and enabled write merging. Disk response time dropped to 6-11ms per CrystalDiskMark, random read latency hit 22-40ms via AIDA64, and temps stayed 42-50°C per HWMonitor.