I have a 2 TB Kioxia SATA SSD that has been working for about two years. Games installed on it run normally under Linux, but in Windows many of them display blurry, low-resolution, or otherwise incorrectly loaded textures. Moving the same games to my NVMe SSD immediately fixes the problem. Games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 can run from a hard drive, so the SATA SSD should have enough performance.
CrystalDiskInfo reports 100% drive health with no errors, the SSD firmware is up to date, write caching and performance mode are enabled, and the drive is only about 30% full. The issue also does not appear to be related to the GPU or other hardware because the games work correctly from the NVMe drive. What Windows-specific setting, driver, cache, or storage issue could cause this, and how can I troubleshoot or fix it?
1 Answer
Clearing the DirectX shader cache is worth trying, since corrupted shader data can sometimes cause odd texture behavior. You could also test the games with DXVK to see whether changing the graphics translation layer makes any difference. Since the problem follows the SATA drive only in Windows, reinstalling or updating the chipset and SATA controller drivers, checking the SATA cable and link speed, and testing a fresh Windows installation on that drive would also help isolate the cause.
I’ll try clearing the cache and may reformat the drive as well. I also disabled Windows’ setting that powers down the drive to save energy. It’s especially frustrating because the same games never had this issue in Linux or when installed on the NVMe SSD.