Thursday, February 15th 2024
MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta Ends Windows XP Support
The MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta update was released three days ago—available to download through Guru3D's distribution section—its patch notes tease the exciting addition of "some future NVIDIA GPU PCI DeviceIDs to (our) hardware database." The forward facing nature of this software upgrade brings some unfortunate news for Windows XP operating system users—Beta version 4.6.6's top bullet point provides some reasoning: "Ported to VC++ 2022 compiler. Please take a note that due to this change MSI Afterburner will no longer be able to start under Windows XP. Please stay on the previous versions of the product if you need this OS support." Unwinder's software engineering team has traditionally stuck with the 2008 Visual C++ compiler, hence Afterburner's long history of supporting Windows XP.
The adoption of a more modern compiler has signaled the end for MSI's overclocking and hardware monitoring program on a legacy operating system. Developers largely moved on from XP-supporting endeavors around the mid-2010s—as pointed out by Tom's Hardware: "To get an idea on how late Afterburner is on dropping Windows XP, the last time we reported on any app ending support for the OS was in 2019, when Steam ended support on New Year's Day." Returning to the modern day—4.6.6 Beta's best-of-list mentions that RivaTuner Statistics Server is host to "more than 90 compatibility enhancements and changes"—v7.3.5 rolls out with NVIDIA Reflex and PresentMon integration, as well as programmable conditional layers support. The other headlining feature addition within Afterburner's latest pre-release guise is voltage control for AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT GPUs.
Version 4.6.6
Sources:
Guru3D (download link), VideoCardz, Tom's Hardware
The adoption of a more modern compiler has signaled the end for MSI's overclocking and hardware monitoring program on a legacy operating system. Developers largely moved on from XP-supporting endeavors around the mid-2010s—as pointed out by Tom's Hardware: "To get an idea on how late Afterburner is on dropping Windows XP, the last time we reported on any app ending support for the OS was in 2019, when Steam ended support on New Year's Day." Returning to the modern day—4.6.6 Beta's best-of-list mentions that RivaTuner Statistics Server is host to "more than 90 compatibility enhancements and changes"—v7.3.5 rolls out with NVIDIA Reflex and PresentMon integration, as well as programmable conditional layers support. The other headlining feature addition within Afterburner's latest pre-release guise is voltage control for AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT GPUs.
- Ported to VC++ 2022 compiler. Please take a note that due to this change MSI Afterburner will no longer be able to start under Windows XP. Please stay on the previous versions of the product if you need this OS support
- Please take a note that size of mandatory VC++ 2022 runtime redistributables roughly doubled comparing to the previously used VC++ 2008 redistributables, and we'd like to avoid providing overblown application distributive, drastically increased in size due to bundling newer and much heavier VC++ redistributables with it. To deal with this issue we provide our own original tiny web installer for VC++ redistributables, which allowed decreasing the size of final application distributive drastically even comparing to the previous VC++ 2008 based version. Please take a note that install time can be increased slightly due to downloading VC++ 2022 runtimes redistributables on the fly during installation. If you install MSI Afterburner offline, you can always deploy required VC++ 2022 distributives later with web installer by launching.\Redist\VCRedistDeploy.bat
- Added voltage control support for AMD RADEON RX 7800XT series graphics cards
- Added some future NVIDIA GPU PCI DeviceIDs to hardware database
- Now MSI Afterburner reinitializes skin scaling engine on DPI scaling change events to prevent cases when GUI looks cut off in some cases (e.g. after switching between display resolutions with different DPI scaling settings)
- Fixed instances enumeration for some performance counters with no localized names (e.g. GPU related Windows performance counters) in PerfCounter.dll plugin
- Added experimental support for "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for global language support" option enabled in administrative regional OS settings. Now each localization description file contains additional "Codepage" field, defining runtime ANSI to UTF8 conversion rule for selected language pack
- Seriously revamped German and Ukrainian localizations
- RivaTuner Statistics Server has been upgraded to v7.3.5: New version's changes list is huge, it includes more than 90 compatibility enhancements, changes and new features including programmable conditional layers support, PresentMon and NVIDIA Reflex integration
19 Comments on MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta Ends Windows XP Support
I was really excited, but it doesn't seem to work. The UI is still twice as big when I switch from 4K to 1080p, and it goes beyond the display area (Default v3 skin - big edition). :(
EDIT.
The Settings menu seems to adjust the DPI correctly, but the actual skins are not affected. The only way I can get the skin to resize when changing resolution is to override the scaling with the "System" (not Enhanced) option. It looks pixelated, but at least it scales. The System (Enhanced) option looks great, but it breaks the monitoring window (the small one, not the detached one).
PS.The Afterburner project is alive and kicking - if you're curious in its status/progress - here's the main/official topic where the AB developer is posting news regarding every new release.
Can you give me an example of what this means? What does the "GUI looks cut off" mean, then?
The point of DPI scaling is so everything is the same size when switching resolutions.
And no, while applying DPI settings to traditional windows is fine but doing that on skinned application with raster GUI is a pure evil and a direct way to blurry UI. That's why both AB and RTSS provide own scaling settings for skinned GUI, which do not depend on OS DPI settings. And it won't change.
I'll just stick to using the slightly pixelated "System" scaling override. It's not that bad on a TV, better than having a gigantic UI when switching to 1080p. ;)
On another note, I'm curious to test the Reflex limiter. Can I expect lower input lag compared to async in games that don't support Reflex? Any downsides?
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