How to fix Intel 760P IO blocking in AC Valhalla?
Every time I entered a town in Northumbria, the game would randomly lock up for 3-5 seconds, and I honestly wanted to throw my keyboard. The Intel 760P 512GB is an older NVMe, and it just can't handle high-concurrency IO requests, with response times often spiking over 100ms, which causes the game engine to just hang. I tried moving the game to an HDD just to see the difference, and load times jumped to three minutes—that was a wake-up call that the 760P was already my absolute baseline. I downloaded and flashed the latest official firmware and changed the Windows disk scheduling algorithm to Fair Scheduling. Under Iometer stress tests, random write latency dropped from 120-150ms down to 45-60ms, and the town freezes are gone. I almost bricked the drive when the power cut during the first firmware flash, but I managed to save it using a backup PSU. Temps are sitting at 40-48℃ with load fluctuating between 70-85%. Backed up the driver config via a system image, and the scheduling is finally stable.
