MSI Afterburner Project Faces Difficult Times
Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolaychuk has confirmed that the Afterburner project may be closed.
The most popular overclocking tool for modern graphics cards faces licensing issues due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. The sanctions prevented companies like MSI from fulfilling their obligations under contracts they signed with developers. Based in Russia, Alexey is currently continuing the project without MSI support.
The developer confirmed that the project has been closed for over 11 months. As he explains, the current political climate is preventing MSI from fulfilling its obligations. This project is currently only supported in Alexey’s spare time.
Alexey on MSI Afterburner support, Source: Guru3D
MSI Afterburner is one of the most popular tools for discrete GPU overclocking. This software is the spiritual successor to the RivaTuner software used for overclocking GPUs many years ago. Users may find it difficult to find alternatives that natively support all of the many GPU vendors. Most brands now include their own monitoring and simple overclocking software that also controls GPU features such as lighting controls and fan speeds. MSI also has a tool called MSI Center.
It’s worth mentioning that MSI is still officially listing software for their newly released GPUs, including the RTX 4070 Ti. The popularity of the software means that scammers are trying to take advantage of it by releasing cloned apps containing malware. MSI is fully aware of this fact and continues to mention that the official source for the software is still his website at MSI itself. The following tweet was posted by him in November, just months after he failed to meet Afterburner’s licensing obligations.
MSI mentions Afterburner, source: MSI
The only good news is that RTSS (RivaTuner Statistic Server) is not an MSI tool and is not subject to sanctions. This statistics and overlay software is fully supported by Alexey and will continue to be supported. However, third-party software using RTSS will not be affected.
Alexey confirms that he will continue to support the Afterburner project in his spare time, but this is not the full support many of us prefer. It is important to note that sanctions are not limited to monetary compensation, but may include access to pre-release hardware, which can inherently slow down the development process or prevent it altogether. It means that there is sexuality.
Source: Guru3D Forum
