Today, all companies offer different types of role management programs and applications. One of the most iconic and used is MSI Afterburner, which allows you to adjust the frequencies of the graphics in a simple way. Well, it seems that MSI hasn’t paid Afterburner developer for a year.
If we don’t know Afterburner, tell you that this application is one of the simplest and most effective to modify the frequencies of the graphics card. Although it was initially more focused on professional overclockers, due to its simplicity of use, even less experienced users use it.
MSI hasn’t paid Afterburner developer for a year
The story, in this case, is quite complex. MSI Afterburner is developed by Alexey Nicolaychuk, a Russian programmer known to the forums as Unwinder. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, MSI suspended payment to Nicolaychuck attending to “political reasons”.
Since then, Nicolaychuck has continued to maintain the software for mere personal interest during 2022. He was hoping that MSI would manage to find a mechanism to pay him. One of the simplest would be to pay you using Bitcoin or Ethereum, since blockchain transactions cannot be prevented by any government or entity.
While all this was happening, in Russia it was still and continues to sell MSI hardware. But, while continuing with the development of the software, he has not seen rewarding his work. Something that has forced Nicolaychuck to post in forums to immediately cease the development of the application.
Continuing to maintain the application is crucial for Afterburner, among others, to work on upcoming graphics cards released to the market. So, from now on, this software will no longer support any graphics card that is released. The NVIDIA RTX 4070 will possibly be the last to receive support, if nothing changes.
War and politics are the reasons. I didn’t mention it in the MSI Afterburner development news thread, but the project has been semi-abandoned by the company for quite some time. Actually, we are approaching the one year mark from the day MSI stopped fulfilling its obligations under the Afterburner license agreement due to a “political situation”. I tried to continue to fulfill my obligations and worked on the project on my own for the past 11 months, but it resulted in nothing but disappointment. […]Regardless, I’ll try to keep supporting it myself while I have some free time, but I’ll probably have to give it up and switch to something else, which will allow me to pay my bills.
Explains Alexey Nicolaychuk
Are we approaching the end of an era?
It seems that we are heading towards the end of overclocking. This de facto suspension of MSI Afterburner development leaves us with almost no tools for tweaking graphics cards. And it is that EVGA Precision X, the second most popular application, has also been discontinued. Note that EVGA has recently exited the graphics card market for leaving very small margins.
One of the few tools left for this practice is ASUS Tweak III, which isn’t bad at all. But, from what we have seen, will ASUS be the next to abandon this type of software that allows you to adjust the frequencies and other parameters of the graphics card?
