A Grand Theft Auto Online fan recently discovered why the super-popular MMO takes so long to load on PC, even on the beefiest of setups, and Rockstar will be implementing their suggested fix in a future update.
GTA Online fan, and person who knows about computer things, t0st recently returned to their game to try out some of the new content and was frustrated to discover how long it still took to load (between six and 15 minutes for the majority of players), even seven years after its release. One would think some optimisation would have occurred. So, they did some digging and discovered that, in the most basic sense, there was “a single thread CPU bottleneck while starting up GTA Online”. Modern setups often have at least eight threads to work with, so something was clearly awry. Check out t0st’s explanation for all the details, if you’re into that sort of thing.
According to PC Gamer, Rockstar has 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. As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.
Rockstar has also awarded t0st a $10,000 bounty, something usually reserved for the discovery of security-related bugs. It’s unclear when the update will be released, but, according to t0st, the fix should improve load times for GTA Online by about 70 percent.