Someone has figured out how to reduce GTA Online load time by almost 70%
Some simple coding tweaks have fixed one of GTA’s most irritating issues.
Grand Theft Auto 5’s loading times have been the root of
many joke over the last seven years-even the best of PCs will leave players
waiting because of the annoying waiting time. The agonizing wait has led a
player to enter the games code, and with some tweaking has managed to reduce
the loading time by almost 70%.
GitHub user tostercx has uploaded the fixed code, though
they do warn it’s more of a proof of concept and not intended for casual use.
They were also kind enough to provide a breakdown of the entire process.
The lengthy loading time tostercx experienced a six minute
wait for GTA Online to boot up-are, in part, attributed to some terribly
optimised code and a 10mb JSON file containing 63,000 item entries.
Every time an item is found, the check runs again… and again. tostercx estimated that this
leads to around 1,984,531,500 checks.
This, long with the fact the game was only loading from a
single core on tostercx’s CPU, appear to be the biggest bottlenecks. But after
a couple of fixes that optimised the code, tostercx was able to reduce the
loading time to a much more digestible one minute and 50 seconds, a 69.4%
improvement on the original time.
It’s a huge reduction, which tostercx claims shouldn’t take “more
than a day for a single dev to solve.” They even leave some suggestions for
Rockstar, ones which hopefully will be acted on though it’s doubtful given how
long players have put up with long load times already.