Just gonna lay off some more info for you, if you're interested.

To check what drive is what, press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, that'll open Task Manager, go into the heartbeat icon, it'll lay your drives information, which disk they are (starting from 0) and what they are: HDD (SATA), SSD (SATA) or SSD (NVMe).

NVMe SSDs can have different speeds, even when being the same SSD. Depending on which PCIe slot you use, you can have different latency and performance. The closer one to CPU should be faster, while others may be a bit slower. This shouldn't have much effect though.

Be sure to put new games on NVMe's, if you can't, you can still put most of them into HDD or SSD SATA, but you may have to wait more. Some SATA SSD are very fast, but NVMe is fastest. There's also an option to put a SSD and HDD together, for speed and storage, but that's something I'm not familiar with and can't help you with. Feel free to search about it.

Assure you're SSD is on the best PCIe slot possible. What I mean by that: some SSD can take PCIe 5 speeds, but you are using it on a PCIe 4 slot, which tanks it's performance. Be sure, it's on the best slot possible, the closest to the CPU should always be the best PCIe Gen available, other slots may follow suit, depending on motherboard chipset (A, B, Z, X and the numbers, the numbers are the chipset).

If you're using a SSD NVMe and it's slower than it should, try TRIMing it, if that doesn't suffice it, you may need to defragment it. Defragging a SSD is alright, it'll not break, just chip a bit of it's life out (TRIM also does that, but less so, writing files also does that, to different degrees). When fragmenting is on a high level, the SSD controller may not be able to keep up and speed will plateau. Windows already TRIM's it automatically, but I'm not sure what is the default schedule for it; you can customize automation on the defrag tool on Windows or using software for your SSD (if your brand has it).

One more tip: put your Steam folder in the exception list of your Windows Defender or anti-virus. That may help performance, since Windows like to scan files that are executed or called, which takes I/O and CPU time. You can check a search engine to find more information about how to do it. You can also put your NVIDIA, AMD or Intel shader folders in the exception as well. Another thing you can do, but this is not 100% sure to help performance, is to disable exploit settings (IN A APP PER APP BASIS) for your games. You would like to disable: CFG, DEP, Mandatory ASLR, Bottom-up ASLR (High Entropy), SEHOP and Validate heap integrity. Do this in APP per APP (Programme settings), do not do it globally.

Hope that clears even more doubts you have. Keep in mind this is not only Requiem based, this apply to all games alike. You don't need to follow everything, search on what you're scared about (or seems scary to do) or just don't do it.

EDIT: added some sources

Yes. All categories require you to do release Elpis.

There's a lot of things that can be the cause. It's not strange to have a bit of loading from Grace > Leon or Leon > Grace, but 30 sec is not expected.

I'll assume you're using a NVMe SSD for this game. This game uses DirectStorage to make loading times faster. Instead of decompressing the assets using your CPU, it uses your GPU (that's why many sections have spikes in GPU usage, even though there's not much happening in terms of rendering). This can be good, if you have lingering GPU power, as the GPU is faster on decompressing, compared to the CPU, thus giving the CPU more time for doing other things (like draw calls, physics, AI...). However, if your GPU is being heavily used, it might hurt your performance.

There's no toggle from CAPCOM to disable DirectStorage or to change it from "GPU, using Compute Queue" to CPU, which is something DirectStorage can do, if prompt to - although it will be slower compared to tradicional loading methods using CPU.

You can try lowering settings that are taxing to the GPU and see if that fixes it, if not, install REFramework Nightly for RE9. REFramework disables various CAPCOM DRM related checks that affect performance, more on the CPU than GPU (while there's information about it being used on render and praydog says it may affect performance, on RE9, it's inconclusive). You may have to install it anyway, to use Orphanage Skip and some other mods - pratice ones, for instance -, just having it installed will help performance.

Be sure to no have programs that take a lot of I/O from your PC closed, i.e: Steam (when downloading or updating a game), downloading a file from your browser and any other thing that writes (or reads) to the storage the game is; this will also lower CPU usage and GPU usage (depending on the app).

Also, since most people don't say, be sure to check RE9 as a game using Game Bar (and also having Game Mode enabled in Windows options). To do it, just open the game > press Win+G > click on the cog above > More Settings > General > check "Remember this is a game"* > press Win+G again > ALT+TAB out and in of the game > Game Mode should be engaged.

*if instead of the Remember this is a game toggle, theres's just the window's name on it, "Resident Evil Requiem", that means Microsoft already enabled it for Requiem.

Game Mode gives a variety of enchacements to the game, most of just being priority and incremental performance.

I hope that fixes it for you or enchance at least a bit.

EDIT: posted pictures to ImGur so they stand the passage of time.

Fixed.

Oh yeah, sorry. Edited this now.

I wanted to make something more creadible, so I done a speadsheet using Yapped, to pick the right values, and adding some notes.

If something is wrong or can be make better, please, feel free to do so.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wyCJ2iXI87aAIK2qiSsioGz6vHTq_vqrTDvB241w_0E/edit?usp=sharing