'MSI Afterburner is a bit PowerColor Afterburner now' as the dev had to buy another manufacturer's GPU to build support for AMD's RDNA 4 graphics cards into the next beta

GPU overclocking and tweaking tool Afterburner has been the app of choice for countless PC gamers around the world since it first launched way back in the late 2000s. Since then, it's supported almost every graphics card to appear on the market, but as things currently stand, it doesn't fully support AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and 9060 GPUs because MSI doesn't make RDNA 4 cards. Fortunately, Afterburner's developer has a plan to get around this problem.

If you've never used it before, Afterburner is a small program that displays real-time information about your graphics card's clock speeds, temperatures, power consumption, and so on. It also offers tools to overclock the GPU and VRAM, tweak voltages, and along with RivaTuner Statistics Server, provide an in-game overlay showing the above details.

Right from the very beginning, it was the work of one person, Alexey Nicolaychuk (aka Unwinder), until MSI got involved. Even then, the bulk of the updates were handled by Nicolaychuk, though in recent years, Afterburner has been rather slow at keeping up-to-date with all of the very latest GPU releases.

This has been very much the case with AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs in the Radeon RX 9000 series, and it's for one very simple reason: MSI doesn't make AMD graphics cards anymore, so it was unable to provide hardware, plus the vital GPU ID and driver details, required for Afterburner to work properly. But fear not, as Unwinder has worked out a solution to this by himself, as he explained in a post on the Guru3D forums.

"As you know, due to some unknown reason MSI decided to skip RDNA4 and focus on manufacturing NVIDIA GPU based solutions only this round. This means that I get no MSI RDNA4 hardware samples for development, so there is no RX 9070 XT support in MSI Afterburner yet.

But I decided to close this gap myself and grabbed third party hardware vendor's 9070 XT special to add unofficial support for it. So next beta with RDNA4 support is around the corner, and MSI AB is a bit PowerColor AB now."

For the review of the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9060 XT, we used AMD's Adrenalin software (above) to investigate overclocking and voltage tweaking. It does work really well and you can alter a huge number of settings, but hoo boy, does AMD love to hide all its features under multiple menu layers.

We'll be glad to see the next beta version of Afterburner with RDNA 4 support for sure. Somehow, though, I don't think it'll be launched as MSI/PowerColor Afterburner, though!

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