How to fix texture pop-in on an Intel 760P 1TB SSD?
It was driving me crazy seeing buildings stay blurry until I was practically touching them—the texture popping in the streets of Midgar was just eyesore. Looking at the bottlenecks, the Intel 760P 1TB's random read speeds were hovering around 40-52MB/s, meaning the engine couldn't pull high-res textures fast enough while I was moving. My first instinct was to drop the texture quality to Medium, but while it loaded faster, the game looked like a potato, which was a complete dealbreaker for me. I then used the official Intel tool to flash the latest firmware and used a partition manager to re-verify the 4K alignment. In AIDA64 storage tests, the random read latency dropped from 22-35ms down to a tight 14-18ms, and the pop-ins vanished. I did hit a snag where the drive wasn't detected for a few seconds after the firmware update, but a quick M.2 reseat fixed it. Temperatures are sitting comfortably at 38℃ - 46℃. Three rounds of CrystalDiskMark loops confirm the read/write speeds are back where they should be.
