How to optimize WD SN850X storage latency for Kingdom Come 2?
The texture pop-in was a nightmare while galloping through the forests; buildings in the distance looked like they were being glued together in real-time. This lag comes from the WD SN850X struggling with 4K random reads, with response times swinging between 88ns - 115ns. I tried lowering the texture quality in-game, which gave me a measly 5 FPS boost but made the game look like mud—totally unacceptable. I rebooted into the BIOS, forced the storage controller from AHCI to Native NVMe mode, and killed the power-saving state transitions. In AIDA64, my random read speeds jumped from 62MB/s to 84MB/s - 91MB/s, and the flickering vanished. I almost panicked when the system failed to find the boot partition initially, but reloading the default boot order sorted it. The drive is running warm at 48℃ - 56℃. After three rounds of stress tests, the throughput is solid and my RAM temps are hovering around 58℃ - 63℃.
