Game suddenly has long load times.

I'm not sure when the flashpoint was for this. But I took a break since maybe 2-3 weeks ago.

Logged in a couple days ago and again today, and suddenly load times are really bad?

When opening the game, I see the gears for a while with the ambient sparks in the background before hitting the main menu. Never saw that before. (I knew it existed as one of my buddies I play with streams to me and he has long load times).

Loading screens when entering the game or switching areas take like 10-15 seconds at times. Never took longer than 2-3 seconds before.

Loading effects or textures seems to be delayed. (Tried Olroth today, and his Starfire beam had no visual graphics for about 5 seconds, then they popped in).

Basically it feels like the game moved from SSD to HDD or something.

I used to be able to exit out of the game, relaunch, get back in game, and enter a map before my friend would be able to simply enter the map.

I'm not sure if there was a patch within the last 3 weeks, or if it's related to the most recent NVIDIA drivers... but nothing else has really changed for my situation?

None of my in game settings have changed.

Integrity verified on steam.

I've yet to reinstall... but I generally have trouble accepting such a fix because why should that ever be the answer? Why would the install just brick itself?

I have a hefty gaming rig that ran the game flawlessly before:

AMD 7800X3D
32gb DDR5 @ 6800
Liquid Suprim RTX 4090
Samsung 990 PRO M.2 storage
1200w PSU

Not seeing any issues like this in any other games.

The biggest kicker is that it's just out of the blue.

Dunno if we are allowed to bump this stuff... but like the game feels unplayable for me. Would love to figure it out.

I've even reinstalled the game at this point.