Can queue depth optimization fix WD SN850 lag in Mass Effect?
Whenever I was jumping between ships on the Normandy, the screen would just freeze for a full second—it felt like I was playing a slideshow. The random reads on my WD Black SN850 2TB were acting like a toddler, with response times jumping erratically between 1.2-3.5ms. Out of desperation, I moved the game to an old SATA SSD, but load times went from 10 seconds to 40, which proved I had to fix the NVMe issue. I went into the advanced driver options and bumped the queue depth from 32 to 64, then used a disk cleaner to wipe 12GB of redundant shader cache. In the performance analyzer, the random read latency finally converged to 0.8-1.1ms, and scene transitions finally became acceptable. I did hit a slight system hang right after changing the queue depth, but updating the motherboard chipset drivers sorted it out. Drive temps are now sitting at 48-54℃ with a smooth IO load curve. Exported all the latency logs for archiving, and the storage optimization is officially done.
