The loading times for Grand Theft Auto V are ridiculous. This is true for GTA V itself and even more so for GTA Online. A modder has found a way to reduce these load times by 70%, and it looks like Rockstar has figured it out – luckily, this time it’s not just to turn off the mod in question. Instead, this load time fix is being officially implemented in a future patch.
In more basic terms, t0st reported that there is a single-threaded CPU bottleneck when GTA Online starts loading, and the game spends years reading redundant information from a JSON file that doesn’t have much reason to exist. In his original findings, t0st wrote: “If this somehow gets to Rockstar: the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single developer to solve. Please do something about it. “
In a new update to this post, t0st says it “just received $ 10k” through Rockstar’s bug reward program, which is normally used only for major security issues. t0st adds that “I tried to ask for more technical details, but they couldn’t say anything”.
Rockstar herself told PC Gamer that “after a thorough investigation, we can confirm that the player has actually revealed an aspect of the game code related to the loading times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved. As a result of these investigations, we made some changes that will be implemented in a future title update. “
That $ 10k is likely to be spent better than any GTA Online money, but for those of us watching this, there is still no word on when the official fix will be implemented.