Why does The Last of Us Part I stutter on an Intel 660P 512GB?

I felt totally ripped off when exploring Seattle; the screen would freeze for 0.5s every time I turned, killing the mood. I first tried disabling all background services, but loading times only improved by 0.3s, which was basically nothing. Then I used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to bump the queue depth from 32 to 128 and enabled low-latency mode. CrystalDiskMark confirmed random read performance hit 68MB/s, AIDA64 showed temps at 44-52℃, and 4K latency dropped to 18-45ms per CrystalDiskMark. It's finally smooth.