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A programmer has managed to cut Grand Theft Auto Online load times by around 70 per cent and released a fix to help players.
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GTA Online’s PC load times have been a longstanding issue since launch, and over time they have crept to an average of around five minutes.
A Reddit poll undertaken last year confirmed that half of players were waiting between three and six minutes for the game to load, with some players waiting upwards of 10 minutes.
A blog post written by a programmer using the handle ‘t0st’ explains the reasons for the long load times before going on to cover the steps they have taken in order to implement a fix that reduces the load durations.
The blog post goes deep into the programming behind the game’s loading processes but identifies the core of the issues as a 10MB file with over 63,000 entries that describe every single item available that can be purchased with in-game currency.
GTA Online currently runs a check after each entry in this list, which ends up being very time intensive. By implementing a few quick fixes, t0st was able to reduce load times on his test computer from six minutes to under two minutes.
The blog post also goes into detail about the fixes, and makes a file available for players to download in order to reduce their load times.
T0st hopes that if the post makes its way to Rockstar Games then someone will be able to take action. The blogger wrote: “the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve.”
GTA V continues to sell well, with 2020 being the best year for the game since it launched in 2013. Estimates put sales of the game at around 10 million for the second half of 2020 alone.
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