MSI Afterburner is the latest app to ditch Windows XP support

According to the latest data from Statcounter, Windows XP is still installed on roughly 0.57% of PCs, which is a lot of outdated hardware and software with regular access to the internet. Most developers dropped Windows XP shortly after Microsoft ended its extended support in 2014, forcing users to switch to Windows 7 or 10. However, there are still some apps that continue working and receiving updates on Windows XP. MSI Afterburner, though, is no longer among them.

MSI Afterburner has been updated to version 4.6.6 with a few notable changes, such as voltage control for the Radeon RX 7800XT, support for future Nvidia graphics cards, Unicode UTF-8, and various bug fixes. More importantly, it now uses VC++ 2022 compiler, which renders the app unable to run on Windows XP.

With that said, it is not the end of the world for Windows XP users. They can still use previous MSI Afterburner versions to overclock and monitor their GeForce FX 5900, ATI Radeon 9000, and other true-to-era graphics cards.

As for Riva Tuner Statistics Server, its latest update packs "more than 90 compatibility enhancements, changes and new features, including programmable conditional layers support, PresentMon, and Nvidia Relex."

Here is the complete changelog for Version 4.6.6:

• 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

You can download MSI Afterburner from Guru3D and the official MSI website.

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