How to reduce PCIe link latency for FireCuda 530 in The Witcher?
The moment I hit the Novigrad city gates, the screen just froze for a full second. It felt like a joke given my specs. It turns out the FireCuda 530's PCIe 4.0 link was fighting with the motherboard's USB 3.2 controller during high-concurrency reads, causing I/O competition that spiked latency to over 120ms. I tried closing all background apps, but the freezes stayed—a pretty pathetic attempt on my part. I eventually went nuclear: I disabled unused SATA ports in the BIOS and set the hard disk sleep timer to 0 in the power plan. Monitoring with HWInfo, the response time stopped swinging between 15-110ms and settled into a clean 5-12ms range. I actually messed up and set the PCIe mode to Gen 3 by mistake during the process, which halved my speeds, but once I reverted that and fixed the power plan, it was perfect. Drive temps are 42-50℃, and my fan speed is steady at 1400-1600RPM.
