Can I fix WD SN850 texture popping in AC Valhalla?
It was honestly pathetic. In a gorgeous Norse setting, I was seeing buildings turn into blurry blobs. It felt like playing a game from twenty years ago. Even though the WD Black SN850 1TB is fast, my drive was nearly full, causing massive write amplification. My 4K random reads tanked from 52MB/s to a miserable 14MB/s. I tried disabling the Windows Search indexer, but that did absolutely nothing except make my file search slower—a complete waste of time. I finally manually moved the virtual memory (page file) to a separate physical drive and ran a full optimization pass. My monitoring tools showed read latency drop from 115ms to a stable 42-55ms, and the texture popping vanished. I did hit some I/O blocking during the migration until I locked the page file size at 16GB. SSD temps are 40-52℃, heatsink is 32-40℃, and the fans are humming along at 1400-1600RPM. Everything finally looks the way it should.
