Why does Sapphire RX 7800 XT lag during rat sequences?
Whenever thousands of rats swarm the screen, the game starts twitching, which is incredibly stressful during stealth segments. The Sapphire Polar has great thermals—core temps were only 55-61℃—but the shader compilation queue was backing up in the background, causing GPU utilization to bounce wildly between 40% and 98%. I tried updating to the latest Beta drivers, but that was a complete disaster; it didn't fix the lag and actually caused random black-screen reboots. I eventually used a cleanup tool to wipe 4.2GB of shader cache and rolled back to a known stable driver version. In the performance analyzer, frame time variance dropped from 15-45ms to a tight 8-12ms. I noticed the initial load time increased by about 20 seconds after the rollback, but it went back to normal after a second reboot. VRAM usage now sits at 11.2-13.5GB with fans spinning at 1200-1400 RPM. The rendering block is gone and the controls feel responsive again.
