How to fix loading hitches on MSI A520M-A PRO in Witcher?
This motherboard is barely hanging on when facing the massive textures of the Remake; every time I enter a new zone, the frame rate just chokes, and it's honestly pathetic. The MSI A520M-A PRO's PCIe lanes were hitting a 15 - 25ms scheduling delay during heavy NVMe reads, leaving the CPU idling while waiting for data. I tried lowering the graphics settings, but the game looked like something from the 90s, which was a useless 'fix' that left me speechless. I went into the BIOS, forced the PCIe speed to Gen3 instead of 'Auto', and killed every redundant background update service in Windows. CrystalDiskMark showed random reads jumping from 38 - 42MB/s to 45 - 50MB/s, and the transition stutters dropped by about 30%. I had a weird issue where some old peripherals weren't recognized after the Gen3 switch, but a quick unplug and replug of the USB ports fixed it. Chipset temps are steady at 50 - 58℃, with response times around 0.05ms.
