Why does Horizon Zero Dawn freeze when entering forest areas on Zhitai?

Every time I entered a new natural area, my computer acted like it crashed, with the screen freezing for two seconds—it was maddening. I tried installing the game on a different partition, but it froze regardless of the drive, which made me want to uninstall the game. I used GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase the queue depth to 2048 and optimized the prefetch instructions. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K reads recovering to 60-66MB/s, and internal usage was 14-18GB.