Why are textures popping in so slowly during exploration in Horizon Zero Dawn on my Intel 760P?

Watching distant mountains load in like low-res blocks was honestly painful in such a beautiful open world. It turned out my Intel 760P 512GB had a fragmented SLC cache from years of use, which tanked my random read speeds to below 200MB/s. My first instinct was to lower the shadow quality in the game settings, but that was a total waste of time—the frames improved, but the textures were still a mess. I eventually used the official Intel tool to flash the latest firmware and used a partition manager to re-verify the 4K alignment. The difference was night and day; buildings that used to take 3 seconds to sharpen now snap into focus instantly. I actually struggled with a checksum error during the first firmware update attempt, which only went away after I killed every single background scanner and rebooted. Temps are now sitting comfy between 38-46℃. Checked the system logs and the storage error codes are gone, finally feeling snappy.