How to stop texture popping on Kioxia EXCERIA PRO in Mass Effect?
While warping between planets, I noticed these tiny texture jumps that really broke the immersion of the RPG. Monitoring showed that the Kioxia EXCERIA PRO's PCIe 4.0 link was spamming retransmission requests while handling fragmented data, causing the effective bandwidth to swing wildly between 3000MB/s and 6000MB/s. I tried disabling background services to free up RAM, but the read latency didn't budge—a cautious attempt that went nowhere. I then went into the BIOS, forced the PCIe slot to Gen4 mode, and double-checked the physical seating of the M.2 drive. In CrystalDiskMark's random 4K read tests, latency dropped from 58ms to a steady 32-38ms, and the flickering stopped completely. One annoying side effect was that my boot order got reset, but I just fixed it in the boot menu. Temps are now stable at 45-52℃ with a smooth read/write curve. Real-time monitoring confirms the link is finally running at full speed, and temps stay at 45-52℃.
