Fixing I/O blocking and frame drops with WD SN850X in Spider-Man 2
It was honestly ridiculous—swinging through Manhattan and the game would just hitch for a split second while loading building models. I checked the logs and the SN850X was hitting latency spikes of 15-22ms under peak load, causing the frame time to swing wildly between 20-35ms. I tried tanking the graphics settings to low, but the game looked like a pixelated mess and the stutters were still there. What a waste of time. I finally used the WD dashboard to flash the latest firmware and disabled the Windows write-cache flushing policy. Monitoring with RTSS, the stutters dropped from 4 times a minute to basically zero. I did have a scare where the drive wasn't detected after the firmware update, but a quick reboot and partition check sorted it out. Temps are hovering around 55-62℃. I've exported all the I/O error logs from the Event Viewer for my own peace of mind.
