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 it was working with MSI on the stable release for Afterburner. The result is version 4.6.5, the first stable release since December 2021.
That said, Nicolaychu isn’t exactly celebrating the release. In a forum post on Guru3D.com, he wrote: “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 to answer your questions. The rest are out of luck. I'll focus entirely on development and replying to those, who provide useful feedback only.”
MSI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Interested users should only download Afterburner from either Guru3d.com’s site or the official MSI site for the tool. That's because last year hackers launched fake messages and websites offering Afterburner that actually installed malware.