GTA Online remains a popular (and incredibly profitable) game seven years after launch, thanks to the steady influx of new content, but one thing Rockstar seems unable to improve is the game’s famously long load times. Over the weekend, an enterprising developer called t0st finally discovered why GTA Online takes so long to load – even on machines with fast processors and storage such as the PlayStation 5 and PC – and fixed those issues, reducing his load times by 70 per cent.
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So: after struggling through a six minute load for GTA Online on his mid-range PC, t0st opened Task Manager the next time he loaded up the game and noticed something odd: after the one minute mark, his computer’s CPU usage spiked up dramatically, but storage and network usage were nearly non-existent. That suggested that the lengthy load times weren’t caused by Rockstar’s servers or data being read off a drive – instead, was running on the CPU. Something that required a ton of processing to complete, and only used a single thread.
Armed with this knowledge, t0st used a series of programming and debugging tools to discover two major issues.
First, the game was reading in a text file of all purchasable items in the game – and after every one of 63,000 items, it counts every character in the 10MB text file afresh. Doing this count once is no big deal, but doing it 63,000 times adds up to a whole lot of wasted CPU time.