GTA V and GTA Online is notorious for their slow loading times. On PC, even a fast SSD isn’t helping the loading times.
One GTA Online player, t0st, put out a blog post detailing how he found a way to improve the game’s initial load times. It’s a long, technical post, but the short gist of it is that the load times are not due to network and storage bottlenecks, but it’s a CPU bottleneck. His suggested fix managed to drop the usual 6-minute or more initial loading on startup down to a more manageable 2 minutes.
t0st suggested that it “shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve”.
As the story has been shared around, Rockstar Games have also seen it, and have not only decided to implement t0st’s suggestion on how to improve the loading times.
“After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved,” reads the statement from Rockstar Games to PC Gamer. “As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.”
The update is now live, with the patch notes thanking t0st for his contribution. t0st is also rewarded $10,000 USD as part of Rockstar’s Bug Bounty program. Though the program is reserved for reports of security issues, this one is an exception.
The new title update for GTA V is live now and if you’re on PC, this is why the loading time has vastly improved.
Source: PC Gamer