ONE Grand Theft Auto Online fan who goes by the nickname t0st posted an investigation into the extremely slow load times of the game on the PC, with a solution that improved things by up to 70 percent. And it looks like Rockstar was getting attention: the company confirmed PC Gamer that the t0st fix is legitimate and will implement your suggestions in a future game update.
“After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that the player has actually revealed an aspect of the game code related to the load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved, ”the company commented PC Gamer. “As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a future title update.”
According to the detailed t0st post explaining the problem and its solution, they were first motivated to explore the problem after realizing that it took almost six times as long to go online for Grand Theft Auto than in story mode.
After examining the code of GTA Online at launch, t0st determined that a major bottleneck was due to the single thread CPU processing of a 10MB file that appears to contain a list of all items that can be purchased with the game’s currency. The correction is twofold: it reduces the time it takes GTA Online to check that list and provides a much more efficient method for checking for duplicates using a hash table. Together, the t0st corrections were able to reduce the loading time from about six minutes to just under two minutes on your test machine, an improvement of about 70 percent.
Rockstar did not say when it would implement t0st updates in the game, but GTA Online fans frustrated by long load times should see some relief soon.