Is my WD SN850X 1TB causing lag in Civilization VII?
Every time I start a new era, map gen jumped from 15 seconds to 40 seconds. The anxiety was real. Once the SLC dynamic cache on the WD SN850X 1TB fills up, write speeds plummet from 6000MB/s to under 800MB/s, creating a massive bottleneck. I tried setting the virtual memory to half my free disk space, but that just made things worse in a strategy game, increasing the stutter frequency. I eventually went into Device Manager and bumped the NVMe controller queue depth from 1024 to 2048 and enabled the forced write cache flush. In CrystalDiskMark, 4K random reads climbed from 48 - 55MB/s to 70 - 78MB/s. I did have a weird issue where the drive lagged during idle after the queue change, but switching to the High Performance power plan killed that. Temps are sitting at 42 - 50℃. The load times are way down now, and the input response feels tight.
