Programmer Cuts GTA Online Loading Time by 70 Percent With This Ingenious Trick

Ever since it released in 2013, GTA Online has provided one of the best gaming experiences a player could ask for. The open world of Los Santos has the perfect recipe to give the best possible multiplayer experience. There are activities and missions to play alone or as part of a team with your friends. Players can take part in the countless custom races curated by the community or go on a rampage by taking part in a heist.

While the gameplay and story are on par with the best games of all time, there is one major qualm that the community continues to face seven years after its release. Players hate the exhausting loading times they have to face to get in.

The situation has stayed the same for so long that it has become a popular meme in the community. But a clever programmer may have found the solution to the problem that the players have been begging for all these years.

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The problem causing the long loading times for GTA Online

In a recent blog post, developer t0st revealed the biggest reason for the weirdly long loading times of the game. When the game loaded on his computer, the task manager showed no increased usage for ‘Network’ and ‘Storage’, but had a huge spike for ‘CPU usage’.

This proved that the Rockstar servers weren’t causing this issue. Along with that, the drastic spike in CPU usage also proved that a high processing single thread process ran on the computer.

After some debugging, t0st found out the root issue of this problem. When the game loaded, instead of counting 63,000 purchasable items one by one, the game counts almost 2 billion items because it refreshes after counting every item from the 63,000 possible checks.

It does this to make sure that there are no duplicate items on the final list. This takes up an enormous amount of processing power of the CPU and hence causes the ridiculously long loading times.

The solution

To solve the problem of rechecking items in GTA Online, t0st developed his own code to change a few of the game’s functions. His code changed the frequency of checks made by the game’s code from 63,000 to just a single check. This cut a massive amount of work for the CPU to handle and decreased the loading times by a whopping 70 percent!

Players with a decent experience of programming can use t0st’s code and try the fix for their devices. But as the code messes with the game’s source code, there’s an off-chance Rockstar will ban the player’s account permanently because the fix is considered a hack.

Hopefully, this code will give Rockstar some proof to investigate the issue and engineer a solution in an upcoming patch. Even though it has taken 7 years, it might be time to bury the meme that has given us many rueful laughs.

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