To all the people who own an AMD-powered System (mine is a Ryzen 7 5800X with 32GB DDR4 3200 and a PowerColor RX 6900XT, all on a Gigabyte Aero G X570S) and are experiencing lag and microstutters due to AMD’s/Microsoft’s bad implementation of the so called “firmware Trusted Platform Module (fTPM)”:
DO NOT TURN IT OFF IN YOUR BIOS SETTINGS!!!
I did because even with my very decent setup I experience a lot of stutter (also in other games but not as bad as in FS2020) and I wanted to find out if there is a connection to this issue. The moment I did, I was prompted with Windows telling me to retype my PIN number and a few minutes later XBOX app telling me, FS2020 could not be started due to non-existant internet connection - which was strong and stable all the time.
From there, everything went south: Digital Ownership was gone from XBOX as well as from MS Store, I couldn’t download or verify the game anew from these two apps, repairing and resetting the installation of FS2020 did not help either. The most curious thing, however, was the fact, that even with Firefox or Edge I couldn’t access the web entries for FS2020. Whenever the site tried to load the product description, I was told that an error occured and the product is not available right now.
I reset the BIOS to its old state with fTPM active but even then, the system didn’t let me reinstall anything… until around 15 minutes later when all of a sudden, the game was available again in both stores. Nevertheless, I had to reinstall EVERYTHING, meaning not only uninstall FS2020 in an orderly fashion but also delete every folder associated with it.
Only then I was able to do the full installation which of course included downloading the whole 130 GBs. Fortunately, my connection is 1GBits but it still took around 3 hours.
So once more, please stay away from deactivating fTPM until AMD has rolled out the BIOS version with AGESA 1.2.0.8. They are currently working on the microstutter problem, seem to have optimized thread adressing in their CPUs and roll-out is supposed to happen within the next days.
If you never came across fTPM, check google and AMD/Microsoft. The issue is well known, the guilt lies on both sides because neither of them were really bothering about it until with WIndows 11, it became a major issue for owners of older gaming systems.
