How to stop 0.5s freezes in STALKER 2 with Western Digital SN770?

Stalking through the eerie Zone, every time I crossed a region boundary, the screen would freeze for about 0.5 seconds, breaking the tension. I tried running disk defragmentation in Disk Management, which was completely futile for an NVMe SSD and only added unnecessary write wear. I used GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase the depth to 128. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K random reads improved to 52-58MB/s, and AIDA64 confirmed temperature at 44-51℃.