Why am I seeing texture flickering and loading delays in The Last of Us Part I with a 16GB 5060 Ti?

Walking through the overgrown streets, the distant wall textures were flickering like low-res blocks, which totally killed the immersion. Even with 16GB of VRAM on my Zotac RTX 5060 Ti, the shader compilation queue was backing up in the background, causing resource scheduling latency to swing wildly between 45-62ms. I tried dropping textures to Medium, but the game just looked like mud and the flickering didn't even go away—a total waste of time. I eventually used DDU to wipe everything, installed the latest Studio driver, and manually purged the 8.4GB shader cache folder. Monitoring with RTSS, the frame times dropped from a shaky 22-40ms to a consistent 15-18ms, and the flickering vanished. Pro tip: after the clean install, the game took forever to boot; I had to just sit there for 15 minutes letting the shaders recompile before it felt right. VRAM usage stabilized at 11.2-13.5GB with core temps between 64-71℃. System logs confirmed the scheduling conflict was gone, and VRAM temps stayed chill at 62-68℃.