MSI Afterburner developer Alexey Nicolaychuk, aka “Unwinder” on the Guru3D forums, says that the project is likely dead in a series of forum posts. The overclocking tool has been the de facto go-to for millions of users worldwide and this news comes as a shock to much of the community that relies on it. In recent years EVGA’s Precision X1 gained in adoption as an alternative but it too is now in limbo following EVGA’s exit from the graphics card market although it did release update version 1.3.7.0 with support for RTX 4090 cards in October 2022.
Lack of Updates Led to Reveal
Meanwhile, users have been asking for updates to use AB with their new RX 7900XT cards which triggered the responses from the MSI Afterburner developer. The responses originally began with Unwinder saying they had not received any samples so they were unable to work on any updates but not long after another reply stated that the project is likely dead which, of course, got the community’s attention in asking why and here’s the answer given.
“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.”
War Sanctions to Blame
Alexey, who lives in Russia, does not begrudge MSI but instead explains that the company doesn’t want to risk punishment for violating sanctions as Russia continues the war in Ukraine. The following reply came today after another forum member said they filed a complaint with MSI Europe.
“But it is not their fault at all. They’d love to keep the project alive, but they cannot and will not cancel or bypass sanctions and make SWIFT magically work here.”
However, Alexey adds that even if MSI should stop licensing or supporting the app, development on RTSS will continue as MSI does not own it. RTSS is a companion app installed with Afterburner, arguably its backbone, but can still be integrated into other things and continues to get new features.
“Everything I said above is related to Afterburner project, but I said nothing about discontinuing RTSS development. It is separate and fully hobbyist application created many years before MSI Afterburner was even born. RTSS still gives me a lot of fun to develop it and design new functionality for it, the company is not related to development of recently added RTSS plugins like HotkeyHandler/OverlayEditor, which are also fully hobby inspired. So with or without MSI, RTSS will be alive and get future updates and support. Talking about Afterburner part, I see no sense to try to make it profitable if company decided to freeze the licensing. So if it is dead – let it be so.”
Possible Paths Forward
Forum members are already rallying behind Alexey in trying to find another path for the developer to continue releasing software. One has even said that they work for a hardware company that uses the app and would like to help the developer out in continuing to move forward and asked Alexey to contact them. Others are suggesting Patreon and similar methods to provide income for development but it has already been noted the developer would need to create something else as MSI would not likely release the license for Afterburner.
Discussion (12 replies)
Join Discussion →Interesting.
I just downloaded it for the first time two nights ago.
That was the first time I realized Rivatuner was Russian.
I had assumed that Afterburner was developed by MSI and was distributed along with RivaTuner. I had no idea they were both developed externally to MSI.
So, ~90% of Nvidia GPU owners use MSI Afterburner for overclocking. Without Afterburner, what will take its place?
I've used RivaTuner since it was released decades ago. Currently using EVGA precision.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT, no more Afterburner?!?!?!?!?!!!
I used to use EVGA Precision a long-@ss time ago, way before it was called "Precision X" or whatever they changed the name to. Then there was a time when they had a falling out with the creator of RivaTuner, and around the same time they made a weird decision to have Precision be installed through Steam rather than exist as a standalone program (a decision they reversed after a lot of complaints). I found out that the RivaTuner guy fell in with MSI, and Afterburner was basically the same kind of thing Precision was back then, so I switched to Afterburner and have been using it ever since. Even when I have EVGA graphics cards, I still continued to use Afterburner. I didn't realize Precision was making a comeback. Kinda sucks since EVGA will no longer manufacture and sell graphics cards (still very upset about that).
I don't overclock much with Afterburner, but I use it to create custom fan curves, customize the OSD (which is provided via RivaTuner) to show the info I want (rendering API, framerate, frametime, GPU usage, vRAM usage, GPU temp, system RAM usage, etc), capturing screenshots (when I can't use Steam's screenshot functionality) and on rare occasion screen recording (I don't have access to nVidia ShadowPlay cuz it is locked behind GeForce Experience), stuff like that.
I knew the developer of RivaTuner lived in another country, but I didn't know that he was specifically Russian. Well, looks like war and politics f*cked something up again. Anyways the concern was only for Afterburner. RIvaTuner has always been his own thing, and he'll continue to support it. RivaTuner was there before Precision and Afterburner. So I'm not worried about that.
On the flipside, OC benefits are at an all-time low but it's still great software for monitoring. I'm sure there are ways to manually configure Rivatuner but I've never done it. I've used ASUS Tweak with mixed results and I forget the GIGABYTE one. I always found it amusing that X1 could allow a little higher power limit on EVGA cards though.
I presume EVA Precision X is done since they are no longer doing video cards. If afterburner is also done, I guess I'll have to try Asus Tweak again. My last experiences with that one were not.. pleasent.
Yeah, mine were not the best either but that was when I was still using ASUS cards which ended around a year or so ago.
So,
Correct me if I am wrong, but MSI Afterburner is essentially just a pretty and somehwat easier to use front-end for RivaTuner.
That's why it ships with the RivaTuner statistics engine.
Sounds like we should be able to fall back on RivaTuner in the absence of Afterburner, though it will probably be less intuitive.
The question is, how will they un-afterburner RivaTuner. I wonder to what extent MSI owns the IP and how they can work around it in an unbranded version.
I'd say you're spot on with all of it and it's what I was thinking too but the next trick is just learning how to use Riva w/o it. I've tinkered with it a little over the years but not much more than adjusting where the OSD is located to prevent burn-in with my OLED displays. However, while I was in there, I noticed there's a lot to tinker with.
I haven't looked at vanilla Rivatuner in probably 15 years. I do vaguely remember it wasn't as user friendly as Afterburner though.
I wonder if the Dev is open to leaving Russia. Someone should offer him an O-1 visa and get his ass over here. An entire industry relies on the software he develops.
Reminds me of this XKCD comic turned meme:
Sort of also reminds me of the companies who develop an app using someone else's code w/o giving credit and get into trouble later on.
You could do that with digital AI art as well with a few artists work underpinning everything created by AI. (a few in comparison to the bulk of AI art.).
Oh, the times they are a changing but the song remains the same.