I'm getting these annoying I/O hitches while cruising through the city in Project Orion, why is this?

While tearing through the neon streets, I noticed these micro-stutters that were absolutely jarring, especially at 4K. My Colorful H610M-K's M.2 slot was hitting 15-22ms random read latency during heavy asset streaming, which basically choked the CPU instruction queue. I first tried switching to the Ultimate Performance power plan in Windows, but that just pushed my core temps to 82℃ without fixing a single stutter—totally useless. I eventually dove into the BIOS, forced the PCIe link speed to Gen3 instead of Auto, and disabled Link Power Management for the drive. Using HWiNFO, I saw my frame times tighten up from a wild 25-48ms swing down to a steady 16-20ms. It was a bit of a headache at first because the system wouldn't boot after the lock, but a BIOS firmware update sorted that right out. Chipset temps settled around 48-55℃. The resource allocation curve is finally flat, and the settings are locked in.