Optimizing disk scheduling for Gainward RTX 5070 Ti in Manor Lords
This was absolutely ridiculous—my frames would drop from 110 to 45 during simple scene transitions. It made no sense. I found that the Gainward RTX 5070 Ti Snow Step OC's default driver was struggling with random reads of many small files, creating a massive I/O queue that left the GPU idling. I tried disabling background sync apps, but the drops stayed, so I gave up on that. I installed the official Dashboard tool, enabled Game Mode, and optimized the driver cache strategy. I also went to Windows Power Plan $\rightarrow$ Hard disk $\rightarrow$ Turn off hard disk after and set it to 'Never'. Looking at the frame time graphs, the jagged lines finally flattened out, stabilizing at 7-11ms. Initially, my disk idle power jumped by 3W, but I tweaked the energy thresholds to fix that. Disk temps are 46-52℃ and GPU core is 64-70℃. I backed up the config using a system tool so I don't have to do this again. It's finally a playable experience.
