My game freezes for a split second when switching scenes with an Intel 760P 1TB, why is this happening?

Whenever I hit a new area during stealth missions, the screen just dead-stops for a fraction of a second, which is an absolute nightmare when you're trying to stay hidden. The random read performance of the Intel 760P 1TB is honestly struggling with modern assets, with read latency swinging wildly between 15 - 32 ms. I tried bumping the virtual memory to 32 GB at first, but that was a total fail—load times actually got 12% worse, which left me completely baffled. I eventually dove into Device Manager and pushed the NVMe controller queue depth from the default 1024 up to 2048 while updating to the latest storage drivers. In CrystalDiskMark, the 4K random reads jumped from 42 - 55 MB/s to a much healthier 65 - 78 MB/s. I did hit a snag where the system lagged during drive recognition right after the tweak, but switching the power plan to High Performance killed that issue instantly. Temps are sitting around 42 - 55 ℃, so the heatsink is doing its job. Frame times finally leveled out to 5.1 - 6.4 ms, making the movement feel fluid again.