Why is my FireCuda 540 lagging in Days Gone city areas?
Riding through the Oregon wilderness is great until a massive horde spawns and the screen just freezes for about 0.5 seconds. It's a nightmare for anyone trying to play seriously. I dug into the telemetry and found the FireCuda 540's PCIe 4.0 lanes were struggling with random fragmented reads, with response times swinging wildly between 12ms - 25ms, causing the resource queue to just pile up. I tried disabling the Windows Indexing service first, but that was a joke—it only bumped loading speeds by 1%. To actually fix the bottleneck, I went into Device Manager and pushed the NVMe controller queue depth from the default 1024 up to 2048, while also killing the Link State Power Management in the power options. After that, CrystalDiskMark showed my random 4K reads jumping from 48MB/s to 62MB/s, and the freezing completely vanished. It wasn't a smooth ride though; after the first tweak, the drive had some weird recognition delays during standby until I switched my power plan to High Performance. Temps stayed between 44℃ - 51℃ with the heatsink doing its job. Checked the performance monitor and the read/write curves are finally smooth, with frame times sitting rock steady at 5.1ms - 6.4ms.
