Instability and performance issues due to fTPM on AMD’s Ryzen processors have been making the rounds on Reddit and the LTT forums for a while now. The feedback from the community has been fairly consistent, with the bulk of them seeing uniform symptoms when fTPM is enabled. These include periodic freezes, system instability, crackling sounds, and reduced performance in some gaming titles (on both Windows 10 and 11).
These performance issues, most notably stutters and freezes in newer games are the result of the latency induced by the handshake between Windows and the fTPM embedded in the firmware. It’s worth remembering that fTPM doesn’t leverage a dedicated chip, rather offloads the job to a firmware implementation of the same on the SPI flash EEPROM module.
Other than straight-up disabling the feature, one of the most obvious workarounds is to switch from fTPM to a dedicated (dTPM) module. There are several listings on Amazon and eBay selling TPM 2.0 modules. Be absolutely sure to disable Bitlocker before switching between fTPM and dTPM, if you have it enabled.
AMD plans to roll out the fTPM fix along with firmware updates sometime in May 2022. These will use the AGESA V2 ComboPI 1.2.0.7 (or later) microcode. It’s worth noting that the Ryzen 6000 processors have already switched from TPM to Microsoft’s Pluton for better security and compatibility with Windows 11.
