How to stop interface lag on Seagate FireCuda 530 in Mass Effect?
Every time I fast-travel between planets, I get these bizarre horizontal tears across the screen. It's an absolute anxiety-inducer. Checking GPU-Z, I realized that since I only have a 500GB drive, loading 4K textures was forcing the system into aggressive virtual memory swapping, causing PCIe link sync delays of 18-32ms. My first instinct was to enable V-Sync in the driver, but that pushed my input lag over 40ms, which felt like playing in mud. Totally unacceptable. Instead, I manually moved the page file to a secondary HDD and forced the FireCuda 530 interface protocol from 'Auto' to 'Gen4' mode. In side-by-side tests, the primary drive's I/O load dropped by about 30%, and the tearing vanished completely at 4K. I did notice the system boot time slowed down by about 3 seconds after moving the page file, but disabling 'Fast Startup' in Windows brought it back to normal. The drive now runs at 45-52℃ with fans at 1500-1700 RPM. A 3DMark stress test confirmed the link is stable, and the input response finally feels snappy.
