Why does Horizon Forbidden West freeze at 90% loading screen?

Fast traveling was a pain; the screen would freeze for two seconds at 90% loading. I tried adjusting virtual memory to half my disk space, but that just caused more read/write conflicts and frame drops. I used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase the limit from 1024 to 2048 and enabled forced cache flush. CrystalDiskMark verified random 4K reads rose from 58MB/s to 75MB/s, and HWiNFO64 showed temps at 48-52℃.