MSI Afterburner is one of the most popular applications to tweak GPUs, adjust fan curves, and show on screen stats. Virtually every tech tuber uses it, and it works for any card regardless of manufacturer. However, it hasn’t recently been updated, and now its fate is unclear. The reason is war.
MSI doesn’t develop afterburner in-house. Russian developer Alexey ‘Unwinder’ Nicolaychuk is the designer of Afterburner, and due to war sanctions, has been unable to continue development.
In a post on the Guru3D forums, Nicolaychuk stated:
War and politics are the reasons. I didn’t mention it in MSI Afterburner development news thread, but the project is semi abandoned by company during quite a long time already. Actually we’re approaching one year mark since the day when MSI stopped performing their obligations under Afterburner license agreement due to “politic situation”. I tried to continue performing my obligations and worked on the project on my own during the last 11 months, but it resulted in nothing but disappointment; I have a feeling that I’m just beating a dead horse and waste energy on something that is no longer needed by company. Anyway I’ll try to continue supporting it myself while I have some free time, but will probably need to drop it and switch to something else, allowing me to pay my bills.
Nicolaychuk is also the developer of Riva Tuner Statistics Server. He stated in a later post that development will continue for RTSS as it’s a personal project.
MSI responded to Nicolaychuk’s post in a statement to PC gamer in which they pledged to continue development of Afterburner and find a solution to pay Nicolaychuk’s back pay. How this will be carried out is yet to be seen.
Revenant’s Reaction: Afterburner is one of the best programs for tuning your GPU, and I have used it for longer than I can remember. I hope that MSI doesn’t try to integrate this into their control center as the control center is not a piece of software most people willingly put on their computer.
