How to fix WD Black SN850 texture pops in God of War?
It was incredibly distracting seeing Kratos' axe cause weird color shifts in the ice crystals during fast attacks; it totally killed the immersion. Looking back at my setup, I realized my WD Black SN850 was running on a 2023 firmware version, which created a nasty 88-112ns scheduling delay when handling DirectStorage calls. I wasted a whole afternoon trying to format the partition, but that did nothing except slow down my boot time by 2 seconds—just a complete waste of time. The real fix was flashing the latest official firmware and moving the drive to the primary M.2 slot closest to the CPU. Running AIDA64 stress tests, the read latency dropped and stabilized at 62-74ns, and the flickering vanished. I did have a heart attack when the system rebooted unexpectedly during the firmware flash, but a quick tweak to the BIOS Fast Boot settings sorted it out. The drive now sits at 48-55℃ with peak power draw between 6.2-7.1W. MemTest cycles confirmed zero data errors, with memory temps holding at 58-63℃.
