Someone Finds How to Reduce GTA Online Load Times

The loading times of Grand Theft Auto 5 have been the subject of many jokes over the past seven years. The painful wait led a knowledgeable player to research the game’s code, and with some tweaks, it was able to reduce load times by almost 70%.

GitHub user tostercx has installed the fixed code, but they caution that this is more of a proof-of-concept and not designed for everyday use. They were also gentle enough to provide a breakdown of the entire process.

The long load times are attributed in part to some highly optimized code and a 10MB JSON file with 63,000 item entries. Every time an item is found, the control runs again… and again. tostercx estimates that this resulted in approximately 1,984,531,500 controls.

This seems to be the biggest bottlenecks, with the fact that the game is only loaded on tostercx’s CPU from a single core. However, after several fixes optimizing the code, tostercx was able to reduce the load time to a much more digestible minute and 50 seconds, a 69.4% improvement in the original time.

This is a huge reduction that should take no more than a day for a single developer to resolve tostercx claims. They even drop some suggestions for Rockstar, which they hope to act accordingly.