How to stop Kioxia G4 signal drops in Space Marine 2?
Having textures just vanish in the middle of a firefight felt absolutely terrible. I decided to dig into the motherboard settings since the high-level fixes weren't working. The Kioxia G4's PCIe 5.0 lanes were in 'Auto' negotiation mode, and it seems signal noise was causing momentary downshifts, creating micro-interruptions in the link between the SSD and the GPU. My first attempt was enabling 'High Performance' in the drivers, but that just added 20ms of input lag, making the game feel like I was wading through mud—completely unacceptable. I went into the BIOS and manually locked the M.2 slot speed to Gen 4 mode and flashed the latest microcode update. Using a frame time analyzer, I saw resource loading latency drop from 25-40ms down to a consistent 12-15ms, and the texture pop-ins stopped entirely. The BIOS update was a nightmare, though; my USB drive format caused the write to fail, and it took two tries to get it to stick. The SSD temperature now stays between 48-55℃. After comparing the visual clarity before and after, the signal transmission is finally rock steady.
