Why is my FireCuda 530 hitching during asset loads?
Whenever I nail a high-speed parry or counter, there is this micro-stutter that is just jarring in a fast-paced action game. I found that once the SLC dynamic cache on the FireCuda 530 1TB fills up, the random read speeds tank from 6500MB/s down to a pathetic 1200-1800MB/s, causing the engine to choke with 2.5-4.1ms of abnormal latency during texture streaming. I first tried killing all background disk scanners in Windows, but the frame time variance stayed exactly the same, which was honestly baffling. I eventually dove into Device Manager and bumped the NVMe controller queue depth from 1024 to 2048, then forced the write cache flush policy in Windows Performance Options. Running CrystalDiskMark showed 4K random reads jumping from 52-64MB/s to 75-88MB/s, and the scene transitions finally stopped hitching. Interestingly, after the first queue depth tweak, I had some weird disk recognition lag at idle, but switching the power plan to High Performance killed that instantly. Temps stayed between 42-55℃, so the heatsink is doing its job. After an I/O stress test, my frame generation time is finally rock steady at 5.1-6.4ms.
