I'm getting massive stutters during scene loads in Judgment: Divine Detention with a Great Wall GW3300 2TB. Why?

Having a loading bar freeze at 95% for ten whole seconds is a nightmare; it felt like I was back in the era of 5400RPM hard drives and it was driving me insane. The problem was the first M.2 slot on my board was occasionally misidentifying the Great Wall GW3300 as a Gen2 device in Auto mode, causing read speeds to tank from 3500MB/s to about 1600MB/s. I tried swapping the drive to the second slot, but that one runs through the chipset and added another 12ms of latency—a total waste of time. I went straight into the BIOS and forced the PCIe mode to Gen3 instead of Auto, then updated to the latest manufacturer firmware. In CrystalDiskMark, sequential reads climbed back up to 3300-3450MB/s, and scene loads dropped to a crisp 4 seconds. I had a heart attack when the drive didn't show up immediately after the firmware update, but a quick reseat fixed it. Temperatures are steady between 45℃ - 52℃. Checked the system logs and the I/O throughput is finally where it should be.