Why does Stellar Blade have random read latency and stuttering when switching scenes with a Samsung 9100 PRO?

While sprinting through the futuristic city, I hit these bizarre 180-320ms freezes during scene transitions that completely killed the vibe. The Samsung 9100 PRO controller struggles with PCIe 5.0 throughput because the default driver queue depth is locked at 32, causing a massive I/O bottleneck when the game requests thousands of tiny assets. I first tried bumping my virtual memory to 64GB, but that was a total waste of time—it actually added about 12ms to the system response, which was beyond frustrating. I eventually dove into the registry and cranked the MaxQueueDepth parameter up to 256, while switching my power plan to High Performance. Running CrystalDiskMark, my random 4K reads jumped from 62MB/s to a steady 88-94MB/s, and the stuttering vanished. I did run into a weird boot delay right after the tweak, but a motherboard microcode update sorted it out. Temps are sitting comfy between 48-56℃. Checking the throughput curves in HWiNFO, my frame times are now rock steady at 5.1-6.4ms.