Can NVMe drivers fix WD Black SN850 I/O issues in Witcher 3?
The texture streaming in this game is a joke; I'm using a high-end drive, yet riding through Novigrad felt like the buildings were made of paper. The WD Black SN850's I/O queue was hitting abnormal delays of 12ms - 18ms when loading Next-Gen 4K textures, leaving the GPU idling while waiting for data. I tried disabling Ray Tracing first, which boosted my FPS but did absolutely nothing for the flickering—a total waste of time. I eventually installed the dedicated WD NVMe driver and ensured my partition was aligned to 4KB sectors. Using a disk performance analyzer, I saw random read response times drop from 15ms to a crisp 3ms - 5ms, and the flickering vanished. I did hit a brief BSOD on the first boot after the driver install, which I only fixed by disabling 'Fast Boot' in the BIOS. Temps are steady at 48℃ - 55℃. I exported the I/O error logs to verify the fix, and the fan speed is now holding steady at 1400RPM - 1600RPM.
