I'm getting very noticeable pop-in across almost every game I play, including Lies of P, Judgment, Pragmata, and LEGO Batman: The LEGO Movie 2. Textures and objects such as road markings, building details, and lights suddenly appear right in front of my character, even when level-of-detail settings are set to Far or Very Far.
My system has an RTX 5070 Ti, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, and a 2 TB MSI M461 NVMe SSD connected to a 1080p monitor. The monitor is plugged directly into the graphics card. I've already reinstalled Windows, used DDU to try several graphics drivers, and experimented with various settings, but nothing has solved the issue.
I've also noticed that copying files while modding a game can make the entire computer nearly unusable for a moment: audio cuts out in Discord and the mouse moves at an extremely low frame rate. When I'm doing light tasks such as watching a video or chatting, the SSD sometimes reports read and write activity only in the kilobytes per second. Could the SSD, motherboard, or PCIe configuration be causing this?
3 Answers
Start by updating the motherboard chipset drivers and BIOS, then check that the main M.2 drive is running in the expected PCIe mode. It’s also worth checking the drive’s health, temperature, firmware, free space, and actual performance with CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark. The MSI M461 is a DRAM-less SSD, which can feel slower during sustained file operations, although that alone doesn’t necessarily explain extreme in-game pop-in.
The whole-system slowdown while copying files is the bigger clue here. Monitor Task Manager or Resource Monitor during the problem and look for the SSD reaching 100% active time, very high response times, thermal throttling, or another process saturating the drive. Also make sure the games are installed on the same healthy drive and that it has plenty of free space. If the drive benchmarks far below its rated speeds or reports errors, test with another SSD if possible.
Some pop-in can be caused by a game’s streaming system or shader compilation, but seeing it in many unrelated games suggests checking the storage and platform first. Confirm the M.2 drive is installed in the CPU-connected slot, verify the PCIe link width and generation in a hardware utility, and disable any unstable overclock or memory profile temporarily. If the issue remains with a different known-good SSD, then investigate chipset, motherboard, or GPU behavior next.
The pop-in is specifically assets appearing as I approach them—things like road paint, lights, and parts of buildings. I’ll check the drive’s health and benchmark results as well as the motherboard settings.