Not Dead Yet: MSI's Afterburner Gets New Release Despite Russian Sanctions
If you’re a fan of Afterburner, MSI's GPU overclocking tool, there’s good news: The free program is going to live on.
On Tuesday, a new stable release for Afterburner launched with expanded support for the latest graphics cards, including Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series and AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 line.
The update arrives months after the program’s developer, Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolaychu, warned that Afterburner’s development had become “semi abandoned,” citing the sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine.
Nicolaychu, who lives in Russia, apparently hadn’t been paid in months for his work. Back in January, he took to the forums on Guru3D.com to say he might have to drop Afterburner’s development, “and switch to something else, allowing me to pay my bills.”
The comments stirred up worries the PC community was about to lose a valuable overclocking tool that works across all kinds of GPUs, including from third-party vendors. However, MSI later responded to the news, and said it wasn’t giving up on Afterburner. It now looks like the company found some way to compensate Nicolaychu.
On Tuesday, Guru3D.com announced(Opens in a new window) it was working with MSI on the stable release for Afterburner. The result is version 4.6.5, the first stable release since(Opens in a new window) December 2021.
That said, Nicolaychu isn’t exactly celebrating the release. In a forum post on Guru3D.com, he wrote(Opens in a new window): “MSI AB 4.6.5 got released, but I'll completely ignore traditional troll/hate overflowed discussions in new version thread in news section.”
“I no longer try to do the things beyond of my obligations,” he added. “MSI GPU owners may try to ping the company PR(Opens in a new window) to answer your questions. The rest
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