How to stop Radeon RX 9060 XT texture flickering in Dragon Age?
The textures on distant mountains were popping in like chunky pixels before slowly clearing up, which is a total immersion killer in a massive open world. I dug into the logs and found that the Vastarmor Radeon RX 9060 XT's PCIe power saving was acting up, incorrectly dropping the link from Gen 4 down to Gen 1.1 during heavy texture streaming. My first instinct was to crank the virtual memory up to 32GB, but that did absolutely nothing—a total waste of time that made me realize this was a hardware protocol issue. I headed into the BIOS, forced the PCIe speed to Gen 4, and disabled every single Link State Power Management option. Checking Device Manager, the bus bandwidth finally stayed pegged above 14GB/s without those random dips. Interestingly, the system took about 3 seconds longer to boot after locking the protocol until I disabled Windows Fast Startup. Now, VRAM temps stay between 72-78℃ and the system is rock steady. After ten consecutive map-hop stress tests, the flickering is gone and VRAM temps are holding firm at 72-78℃.
