Solving bandwidth bottlenecks on Samsung 9100 PRO NVMe
While traveling across the massive world map, the game would just hitch every few seconds, which totally killed the immersion. My Samsung 9100 PRO was only hitting 3800MB/s in tests, which happened because the motherboard mistakenly negotiated the PCIe link at Gen3, creating a massive I/O bottleneck when the CPU tried to pull in heavy assets. I tried the High Performance power plan first, but that does absolutely nothing for a physical link bottleneck, and the hitches stayed exactly the same. I had to go into the BIOS and force the M.2 slot from 'Auto' to 'Gen5' and update the PCIe bridge drivers. Once I did, the read speeds rocketed to 12000-12500MB/s, and the world loading became seamless. I did have two failed POST attempts after forcing Gen5, and I had to slightly dial back my RAM XMP profile to get it to boot stably. Drive temps are sitting at 55-62℃ and everything is running perfectly. Benchmark tests confirm the bandwidth is finally maxed out.
