Ark 2 keeps dropping frames when loading huge creature models on my WD SN850 2TB. Should I be messing with virtual memory?

Every time a massive dino entered my line of sight, the game would hitch for about 0.5 seconds, which is absolutely nerve-wracking during a survival fight. The WD SN850 2TB was struggling with massive amounts of small files, with response times jumping between 15-42ms, leaving my CPU threads just idling while waiting for I/O. I tried killing every single background app, but that only reduced the hitching by 10%—totally useless. I ended up moving the system page file off the C drive to a dedicated storage partition and locked it at a fixed 32GB to stop the overhead from dynamic expansion. In Resource Monitor, disk active time dropped from 85% to 42%, and load speeds jumped by roughly 30%. I hit a permissions wall at first and the game crashed, but manually granting 'Full Control' to the System account fixed it. The drive sat at 51-57℃ with a smooth read/write curve. I used a performance analyzer to verify the I/O scheduling latency is finally suppressed.