Programmer cuts GTA V’s load times by almost 70% – Rockstar needs to fix its game’s poor programming

GTA Online’s loading times are long, regardless of how powerful your PC is. The game world is big, complex and constantly updated, but should that mean that loading times should remain long even though the game is almost six years old on PC? 

Last weekend, a programmed called T0ST discovered a way to shorten GTA Online’s initial loading times by almost 70%, reducing the game’s loading times from exactly 6 minutes to 1 minute and 50 seconds. This was using a system with an AMD FX-8350 and SSD storage. 

With GTA Online receiving continual updates and new next-generation version on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Rockstar should be looking for ways to make GTA V load faster and make the best possible use of the latest gaming hardware. This should be true for both PC and consoles. 

The Problem

The short-hand summary of the problem is that GTA V has a single-threaded CPU bottleneck, struggles to work through a 10MB JSON file and then wastes time with a slow data checking system that T0ST claims is “useless”. 

With AMD’s FX-8350 being a weak processor by today’s standards, offering poor single-threaded performance when compared to the Intel processors of that era, T0ST issues are less prevalent on more modern systems. That said, the boosted single-threaded performance of modern CPUs will still need to waste a lot of time on these same processes, making T0ST fixes hugely valuable for Rockstar and its oncoming GTA Online development efforts. 

The first of GTA Online’s problems is that it struggles to work through a 10MB JSON file that contains 63,000 items. Strangely, GTA V reads this file 63,000 times while loading GTA Online, which adds up to a lot of wasted CPU time. While each read is incredibly fast, skimming though the file 63,000 times quickly adds up to a lot of wasted CPU cycles and creates longer than necessary loading times. 

GTA Online’s second issue is that the game also checks its calculations for repeated values, even though GTA Online’s JSON list contains no repeated items. With the JSON list being 63,000 values long, T0ST believes that GTA Online needs to conduct 1,984,531,500 cross-checks, all of which are appear to be useless. All entries in this file are unique, removing the need for this cross-check entirely. 

To reduce GTA Online’s loading times by almost 70%, T0ST created two fixes that mitigate these major issues, both of which should be considered by Rockstar games. With Grand Theft Auto 5 having over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam every day, the total time-saving benefits would be monstrous. 

If 100,000 GTA Online players could load the game 1 minute faster, the total human time savings would be 69.4 days. T0ST saved over four minutes of time when loading GTA Online with his fixes, making the time saving potential even larger for those with weaker systems.