Afterburner is “probably dead” but MSI is fighting to keep it alive

MSI Afterburner is probably the most popular GPU overclocking tool out there, but according to its developer, it may soon be dead. MSI, however, says otherwise, as the company is trying to keep things going with the dev in question.

In a comment on the Guru3D forum, Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolaychuk, the creator of Afterburner (and Rivatuner Statistic Server), explained that there have been licensing issues with the overclocking app due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. The sanctions that have been implemented against Russia are preventing MSI from paying the developer, who is himself Russian, leading Unwinder to say that the “project is probably dead”.

The developer continues to work on it in his free time, but the lack of compensation for his work has demotivated him to the point that he “will probably need to drop it and switch to something else.. to pay the bills”. According to the Unwinder, he's been working solo on Afterburner for 11 months, but MSI still lists the software for newly released GPUs such as RTX 4070 Ti cards.

Soon after the news spread, MSI issued a statement (via Hassan Mujtaba). “Our product marketing & accounting team are dealing with this problem now,” said an MSI representative. “Due to the war, our payment couldn't transfer to the author's bank account successfully. We are still keeping in touch with him and figuring out how to solve this”. That shows the company is at least trying to do something about all this, so there's still hope that MSI Afterburner will be here for years to come.

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KitGuru says: Afterburner is tool we use frequently here at KitGuru, so let's hope things can be resolved smoothly.

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