My apologies if this is the wrong forum for this request. I hope someone can point me the correct support location if this isn't it.

So I've got 200 hours in the game so far, and embarrassingly did not realize this was a bug in all this time. The game loads extremely slow for me. Not quite "grab a cup of coffee" slow, but loading a "quicksave" can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Loading my game from the main menu is faster at around 30 seconds, and Fast Travel only takes 15 seconds. This really limits my trial-and-error play style and has caused me to try and limit reloads as much as possible, and I assumed it was just poor optimization on CDPR's part. But I finally decided to look up if there are any config tweaks and found a reddit post talking about Astonishingly fast loading times on PC. (/r/pcgaming/comments/kineiq/why_is_no_one_talking_about_the_astonishingly/)
Apparently what I thought was normal isn't normal at all, and it's loading fast for everyone but me.

Is slow loading a known issue on some setups?

Specs:
Game version 1.23
Win 10
GOG Galaxy
AMD Ryzen 5 1600
16GB memory
Geforce 1060 6GB
Installed on SSD, 170GB free
(Samsung 970 EVO nvme)

Please bench your SSD using Crystal Disk mark and post your result.
Your result should be similar to this

May be you have some slow antivirus. Try adding CP2077 folder into exceptions. My quicksaves loading around 12 seconds from SATA SSD.

Hi Andreas_sp, thanks for the advice! Went ahead and ran it with various settings and performance always seemed a little lacking (see below), so I spent a few days not playing the game to optimize my setup, trying to figure out what might be slowing things down. (retrim, checkdisk, write-caching) One issue still to investigate is that my boot partition is on an HDD, although that should only affect booting. My SSD is also constantly in 50-60 degree temps which might be triggering some throttling, but I've already installed an SSD heatsink so nothing else can be done about that. Will probably ask on a tech forum for more help.

Anyway after trying to figure all that stuff out, here are my best results.
https://files.catbox.moe/0o9yaz.png

So, 4k random reads are slightly better than SATA but not at expected values for NVME. Sequential reads are good. It's really inconsistent. There's possibly something wrong with my machine, but I've now spent more time debugging and optimizing this than were wasted total in Cyberpunk's loading screens. I have a vacation coming up in a few weeks so going to leave this for now and come back to it then. Would rather spend my limited free time just playing the game. :)

Definitely want to figure this out eventually since it's working for the rest of you. Here are the highlights from that thread. (it wouldn't hyperlink) Jealous. But at least one dude was in the same boat as me. To be continued. Nah only Windows Defender. I just turned it off to test but no change. Thanks anyway.