Multi-character scenes in Banishers cause huge FPS swings. Even with a ZhiTai TiPro9000 1TB, I hit a wall. How do I map the bottleneck?

Standard benchmark runs often smear the peak performance data, which is why I was getting these uselessly flat lines in Banishers. I first tried messing with thread priority, but that actually triggered a hard thermal throttle, making me think my cooler had failed. I decided to switch to a stepped stress test, incrementally ramping up the core load to isolate the exactly failure point. In my specific environment (Reports-BT-09, using 3DMark 2026 v1.2), I spotted a weird anomaly: when the load hit 60% to 70%, the storage read latency spiked violently to 120ms. Pairing this with a ZhiTai TiPro9000 1TB, I went into the BIOS and forced the PCIe lane training to Gen4 mode to stabilize the throughput. As a result, the multi-core usage finally locked into a solid 80% to 90% range. Yes, my fans now sound like a jet engine taking off, but the performance curve at 4K finally showed a steep, healthy incline. There is something incredibly satisfying about peeling back the layers of a technical glitch and finally forcing the hardware to obey.