Fixing FireCuda 540 I/O congestion in Horizon Zero Dawn?
Seeing those mechanical beasts in high detail is an absolute rush, but the random frame drops were killing the vibe. The FireCuda 540 was hitting its I/O queue depth limit during open-world asset streaming, causing frame times to jump wildly between 16ms and 35ms. I tried lowering the texture quality, which gave me maybe 5 more FPS but didn't stop the hitching—really depressing. I then dove into the driver's advanced settings, switched the read/write policy to 'High Performance', and set the HDD turn-off timer to 0 in the Windows Power Plan. Looking at the RivaTuner curves, frame times finally locked in at 14-18ms. I actually broke things for a bit by enabling some experimental cache acceleration that caused my PC to hang on shutdown, so I had to revert that. Temps are now 45-52℃ with a 60-70% controller load. The response time is way better now, and frame times are a steady 14-18ms.
