Fixing WD Black SN850X system bus lag in Manor Lords
The drive is fast, but handling thousands of fragmented assets in this game makes the loading bar hang, which is just annoying. The SN850X hit an I/O queue depth of over 128, causing a massive resource war between game data and background Windows updates. I tried a basic disk cleanup, which did absolutely nothing and just wasted my time. I then used an I/O scheduling tool to set the game process to 'Highest' priority and killed the real-time search indexing for the game folder. Performance Monitor showed response times stabilizing from a wild 12-35ms down to 3-7ms. I initially limited the I/O depth too much, causing some textures to pop in late, so I bumped the threshold to 64. Temps were 50-62℃. Exported the throughput logs and it's finally stable.
