I'm getting these awful hitches during scene transitions in Dead Space 2 Remake on my ASRock H310CM, is it a VRAM issue?

Every time I entered a new sector, the game would freeze for about 0.6 seconds, which was honestly driving me crazy. The PCIe lanes on the ASRock H310CM-ITX/ac were struggling with the massive texture streaming of the remake, with throughput fluctuating wildly between 7-11GB/s. In a panic, I tried clearing my system temp files, but that did absolutely nothing for the I/O latency. The real fix came after updating to the latest chipset drivers and forcing the PCIe mode from 'Auto' to 'Gen3' in the BIOS, while disabling unnecessary onboard peripherals. CrystalDiskMark showed random read latency dropping from 20ms to 11-14ms, and the transitions became seamless. I did have a scare where the SSD wasn't detected after the first PCIe tweak, but a quick reseat and BIOS update cleared it up. Board temps stayed around 48-55°C, and the game now feels buttery smooth with no more input hesitation.