Gears 5 keeps freezing at 88% loading on my Intel 660P 2TB, is this an I/O bottleneck issue?

Right before hitting the heat of a cover-to-cover firefight, the loading bar just dies at 88%. It is a nightmare for anyone trying to play seriously. The Intel 660P uses QLC NAND, and when handling massive assets, the random read response times jump wildly between 15ms - 35ms, which just chokes the CPU instruction queue. I first tried disabling every useless background service in Windows, which freed up about 1.2GB of RAM, but the stuttering stayed exactly the same—a total waste of time. I eventually dove into Disk Management to recalibrate the 4K alignment and tweaked the registry to force the disk write cache to a flush-mode policy. Checking Resource Monitor, I saw the disk active time drop from a constant 100% peak down to a much smoother 40% - 55% range. Funny thing is, the first time I messed with the cache, my boot time slowed down by 3 seconds until I disabled Fast Startup. Now, temps sit at 42℃ - 50℃ and latency is rock steady at 0.9ms - 1.3ms. Storage benchmarks confirm the random read curves are finally flat. It is a relief to have the settings saved.