Why does Nioh 2 freeze during level transitions on GW3500?

I was devastated when a 0.6s freeze hit right at the end of the loading bar during high-difficulty runs, totally killing my combat rhythm. I tried disabling fast startup and updating all my drivers, but the stuttering frequency didn't budge. Turns out, I needed to use GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to bump the queue from 32 to 128 and enable high-priority mode. After this, FrameView showed peak loading frame times dropped from 48ms to 14-20ms, while AIDA64 measured random read response at 15-32ms and HWMonitor confirmed temps at 40-52℃.