Fixing Intel 660P 2TB write performance in Ghostwire: Tokyo
Wandering through Tokyo is great until the game just freezes and crashes after two hours of play—the performance drop is honestly pathetic. The Intel 660P uses QLC NAND, and once the cache is exhausted, write speeds plummet from 1000 MB/s to a miserable 150 MB/s, causing massive I/O blocks during autosaves. I tried lowering every single graphics setting, but the write speed kept tanking regardless—it was a hopeless situation. I eventually ran a forced full-drive TRIM and locked my virtual memory to 16 MB to stop the constant small-block writes to the QLC cells. Resource Monitor showed the write latency peaks stabilized at 20-30ms, and the crashes stopped. I did have a moment of panic when the drive temp jumped 10℃ immediately after the TRIM, but adding a cheap heatsink brought it back down. Temps are now 38-46℃. I used a system snapshot tool to back up these optimization parameters, though I'm still not a fan of QLC for gaming.
