Should I disable power saving on Kioxia Exceria Pro for KCD?
Man, this game is already a struggle to run, but with this SSD, my FPS tanked to 20 the moment I entered a town. I legit thought my CPU was melting. The PCIe 4.0 lanes on the Kioxia Exceria Pro 1TB were triggering the system's link power management during heavy fragmented resource loads, causing the bandwidth to bounce wildly between 3.5GB/s and 7GB/s. I tried dropping all the graphics settings to low, which gave me maybe 3 extra FPS—basically a joke of a solution that just made the game look terrible. I finally went into Device Manager and set the NVMe controller's power management to Maximum Performance and killed Windows Fast Startup. Checking GPU-Z, the bus interface finally leveled out at 6.8-7.2GB/s, and the frame drops became way less frequent. The only downside was that the idle temp jumped by about 5 degrees, which I only accepted after rearranging my case fans. It's now idling around 52-58℃ and feels rock solid. I exported the read/write curves under this extreme load to verify the data.
