MSI Afterburner GPU Utility Gets A Long Overdue Update With These Upgraded Features
MSI has launched the first new stable release of its popular Afterburner graphics card utility in years. The tool facilitates a host of graphics card tweaks, with the latest ‘4.6.5 stable’ version most notable for adding compatibility with the latest architecture GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA. Yes, this update is long overdue, as enthusiasts have been toying with the GeForce RTX 40 and Radeon RX 7000 cards for several months.
Earlier this year, we reported on some of the reasons that MSI Afterburner hadn’t been updated at its usual pace through most of 2022. You can read the full story via the link, but as the software author summed up in a forum post, “war and politics are the reasons.” To provide a little more detail, Alexey "Unwinder" Nicolaychuk couldn’t get paid by MSI due to the disconnection of the Swift payment scheme from Russian banking. It didn’t help that MSI had been very slow to respond with regard to the payments issue – apparently spurred into action by rumors of the utility’s demise in the tech media.
Now we have the new MSI Afterburner 4.6.5 stable release at hand. It has been a long time since the last ‘stable’ release, with fans of the software having to put up with beta releases in the interim. In fact, the previous ‘stable’ release of Afterburner dates back to 2019.
Thanks to the long delay between releases, and Unwinder’s work ethic, there are many more additions to Afterburner than the important support for the GeForce RTX 40 and Radeon RX 7000 cards. Elsewhere in the release notes, we are pleased to see voltage controls for the newest GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards, the addition of Intel Arc GPUs to hardware monitoring, and the preliminary support for Intel 13th Gen Core and AMD Ryzen 7000 processors.
Scope out the Guru3D hosting page for the full release notes or see below. We also checked MSI’s own Afterburner pages, but they hadn’t been updated at the time of writing (still offering v 4.6.5 Beta 4). For your safety, please remember not to grab MSI Afterburner from anywhere except for MSI direct or Guru3D.
Scope out the Guru3D hosting page for the full release notes or see below. We also checked MSI’s own Afterburner pages, but they hadn’t been updated at the time of writing (still offering v 4.6.5 Beta 4). For your safety, please remember not to grab MSI Afterburner from anywhere except for MSI direct or Guru3D.
MSI Afterburner Version 4.6.5
- Added NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40x0 series graphics cards support
- Added voltage control support for GA103 and GDDR6x based versions of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
- Added AMD RADEON RX 7900 series graphics cards support
- Added total board power monitoring support for AMD RADEON RX 7900 series graphics cards
- Added some future AMD and NVIDIA GPU PCI DeviceIDs to hardware database
- Added Intel Arc GPUs support to hardware monitoring module. Please take a note that Intel Arc GPUs overclocking and tuning is currently not supported due to Intel hardware control API support limitation to x64 applications only
- Added experimental support for Intel 13th generation CPUs
- Added experimental support for AMD Ryzen 7xxx CPUs
- CPU usage data sources in hardware monitoring module have been switched to alternate implementation based on NtQuerySystemInformation(SystemProcessorIdleInformation), because traditional legacy idle time reporting in NtQuerySystemInformation(SystemProcessorPerformanceInformation) is broken in current Windows 11 22H2 builds
- Added workaround for broken fixed fan speed programming API (Overdrive 5 compatible fallback path) for old Overdrive 7 GCN GPUs on 22.5.2 and newer AMD drivers
- Added config file switch for disabling native reliability voltage control API on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 9x0 series graphics cards and forcing legacy P-state 2.0 voltage control API usage on such hardware. Power users may use this switch to bypass voltage control lock on NVIDIA Maxwell series graphics cards on release 515 and newer drivers families
- Improved correction formula parser with data format conversion, rounding and min/max functions support
- Added OCMailbox based bus clock frequency monitoring for Skylake and newer Intel CPUs. Unlike traditional legacy timestamp clock based bus clock frequency estimations, OCMailbox provides support for overclocked BCLK monitoring. Please take a note that access to OCMailbox is blocked by design of OS when HVCI is enabled
- Improved SMART.dll monitoring plugin. Added temperature monitoring support for NVMe devices, including the secondary controller temperature for some Samsung NVMe drives
- Default clock frequency limit of voltage/frequency curve editor window has been extended to 3.5GHz. Please take a note that you may still customize the limits via config file if necessary
- Update server location changed to new URL inside update checking system. Old update server location reached EOL
RivaTuner Statistics Server has been upgraded to v7.3.4
- New version’s changes list is huge, it includes more than 100 compatibility enhancements, changes and new features. We continue improving OverlayEditor plugin and the most of the improvements are related to it, we strongly recommend you to try it if you still use legacy MSI Afterburner’s On-Screen Display output functionality
- New version also includes upgraded DesktopOverlayHost utility, which can be used to display overlay right on your Windows desktop or on small external display mounted inside PC case similar to AIDA64’s SensorPanel
