I'm getting random read lag when moving through cities in Avowed. Why is it so choppy?

Sprinting through dense forest areas occasionally causes these tiny screen hitches that totally ruin the immersion. The WD SN850X 1TB struggles with fragmented scene data, with random read latency swinging between 12-20ms. I tried bumping my virtual memory to 32GB, but that just put more pressure on the drive and actually increased the stuttering—definitely a mistake. I ended up reformatting the drive with a 64KB allocation unit size and turned off the Windows prefetcher. My monitoring tools showed random read latency drop from 16ms to a steady 8-11ms, and the world transitions became seamless. I did have some old software throw compatibility errors after the format, but a driver reinstall cleared that up. Drive temps are stable at 42-48℃ with a load around 28%. Frame time analysis confirms the loading hitches are dead.