GTA V with 70% less loading time!!!

King of the Realm

GTA 5 is one of the most iconic games for many years now and up until today, it's still played by millions of peoples. Especially modded versions or the roleplaying servers are a great success. But one thing is a pain in the but: the loading time. Or should we say: "was a pain in the but"?

It all began with the blogpost of t0st. He's the man behind all of this. T0st is a modder and a GTA community member. Just like many other players he thought that the loading times in GTA V were way too high and decided to do something about it.

First of all, he needed to check out if somebody else maybe already tackled the issue and came with a solution but after some investigation, t0st knew he could make a big difference. And so, his journey began.

After he ran a full analysis, t0st found out that the long loading times had several reasons. One of them and maybe the biggest was the fact that a lot of different tasks were only stressing out one of the cores of the processor. Another example of a problem is that at a certain point during the loading of the game, a file with 63.000 lines gets read. Those lines are the in-game purchasable items and those get matched with all the different playable characters. That process exists out of at least 2 billion calculations and even the nicest gaming rig is going to take some time to do this.

A solution for this problem was the creation of a new DLL file which turned those 63.000 tasks into 1 single task. This new DLL file gives a loading time that is decreased by 69.4%. The solution first got published on GitHub, but at the time of writing, Rockstar Games already looked into the issue and confirmed that t0st's findings were correct.

"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," the company said in a statement. "As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update."

When this update is going to roll out is not certain. If the presupposed 69.4% faster loading times are going to be reached in that fix is also not clear yet. The fact is that it will roll out and it will decrease the loading times for a lot of players and that is something worth getting 10.000$ for!

Rockstar Games has a Bounty Program that reimburses peoples who stumble upon security or privacy issues. In t0st's case, they found it more than fair to surprise him with a 10.000$ bounty for his work.

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