The popular tool MSI Afterburner is on the verge of extinction, at least temporarily, not least because of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions. Because behind the tool is a team of the Russian programmer Alexey Nicolaychuk, who has not been able to receive any remuneration from MSI for many months due to the sanctions and has therefore been providing the project with updates alone in his free time for a while. Also ours Colleagues from PC Games Hardware report including an update.
Because in the meantime MSI has also made a statement and wants to try to find a solution. So it’s obviously not the case that the project should be shelved forever. However, Nicolaychuk has not had this impression in recent months and appeared very frustrated in his statement. He has the feeling that he is investing his time – mainly his free time – in a dead project because of the lack of pay. It seems he also lacked communication from MSI. However, MSI’s statement shows that the manufacturer is definitely interested in continuing the tool.
With the MSI Afterburner you can overclock or underclock most graphics cards, lower the voltage to save power, define your own fan curve and record not only the performance and sensor values from the graphics card, but also those of the CPU and more. The MSI Afterburner evolved from the Riva Tuner developed by Alexey Nicolaychuk in 1997 – the latter was last updated as a stand-alone tool in 2009. Although Afterburner is freeware with the MSI label, all modern graphics types theoretically work with it. Depending on the model, however, one or the other function may be blocked. Discontinuation of support would mean that Afterburner is no longer compatible or only partially compatible with the graphics card series that have been newly released in the past few weeks and that will appear in the future.
