How can I reduce the long black screens when loading levels in Assassin's Creed Shadows?

Waiting for the screen to load was killing my immersion. I tried closing background apps, but it only saved 2 seconds. I used GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to raise the depth from 512 to 1024. Sequential read speed jumped from 7000MB/s to 7300MB/s per CrystalDiskMark. Load times are now 3s. I exported the config.