Why does my Zhitai TiPro9000 hitch in The Last of Us Part I?
When hitting the Boston ruins, the loading bar just hangs for a second, and that random read latency is a total nightmare for any hardcore player. While the Zhitai TiPro9000 has insane theoretical speeds, I noticed in HWiNFO that response times were swinging wildly between 12-28ms when handling small file fragments. I first tried disabling Fast Startup in Windows, but that was a waste of time and actually added 3 seconds to my boot. I eventually installed the latest storage controller drivers and forced the motherboard power plan to High Performance. In CrystalDiskMark, my 4K random reads jumped from 62-71MB/s to 88-94MB/s, and the hitching completely vanished. I did hit a snag where temps spiked to 72-76℃ after the driver update, but tightening the heatsink pressure brought it back down to 58-64℃. With the I/O queue depth stable at 32-64, the data stream is rock steady. Frame times are now sitting pretty at 5.1-6.4ms.
