Battlefield 2042 loads faster on VHDX than NVMe – workaround confirmed

System:

Windows 11 Pro (clean install)

KC3000 2TB Gen4 NVMe SSD (OS + games)

Samsung 840 250GB SATA SSD (old backup drive)

32 GB DDR4 RAM

AMD CPU + Radeon GPU

Game installed via EA App

Issue:
BF2042 had long loading times on the KC3000 NVMe:
• 45 to 90+ seconds from map start to spawn
• 60–110 seconds from desktop to main menu

After moving the game to a much slower Samsung 840 SATA SSD, load times dropped significantly:
• 20–45 seconds into maps
• Faster and more consistent to menu

KC3000 benchmarks are solid (7000 MB/s, <0.04ms latency), no issues elsewhere.

What didn’t help:
• Reinstalling game and EA App
• Cleaning shaders and cache files
• Disabling Defender, indexing, OneDrive
• DX11 vs DX12
• PCIe changes, write cache, firmware
• Fresh Windows install

What did help:
• Created a 300 GB VHDX file on KC3000
• Mounted it as R:\
• Did a clean install of BF2042 to that VHDX via EA App
(Note: EA App didn’t recognize copied files – full reinstall required.)

Result:
• ~60 sec to main menu
• 20–30 sec into maps
• More consistent and faster than KC3000 or SATA SSD

Conclusion:
Something in BF2042 or EA App causes inefficient loading on NVMe. Using a virtual disk avoids that. Please investigate NVMe-related bottlenecks or DirectStorage handling.