Although Grand Theft Auto Online has enjoyed practically endless success since its release years ago, not everything about the game is golden for players. Grand Theft Auto Online's loading time upon starting up the title, for example, has been a common complaint among players. Help is now on the way for that problem, and courtesy of a fellow player.
Grand Theft Auto 5 and its attached Online experience are expected to see a next-gen upgrade for Xbox Series X/S and PS5 later this year. However, gamers won't have to wait that long for some level of improvement in loading times.
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Back at the start of March, a programmer going by the name t0st, frustrated by the fact that GTA Online hadn't seen a significant reduction in loading time after all these years, dug into the code to find the problem. Their hunt led them to a single bottleneck in the code that was only present in the Online version of the game. The programmer offered a way to alter the programming to eliminate this bottleneck, cutting GTA Online loading times by up to 70%.
Rather than offering the alteration and leaving it that, t0st thoroughly explained their findings and asked Rockstar to implement their information to create a fix. While it could have ended there, apparently Rockstar took notice and actually did just that. Rockstar has now announced that a fix based upon t0st's findings will be added in an upcoming patch. While it hasn't promised up to a 70% reduction in loading times as t0st's fix did, any sort of reduction in loading time and strain on a user's CPU should be a bonus for players.
While players are likely happy right now, chances are that t0st is, too. Rockstar Games not only publicly acknowledged the fix, but it also awarded t0st a Rockstar Bug Bounty of a whopping $10,000. While these awards are typically reserved for those who discover bugs that can be exploited by players or hackers, this fix was apparently so good that Rockstar bent the rules this once.
For now, there's no information available on exactly when this update will be available for players. However, GTA Online undergoes regular updates, so players likely won't have an overwhelmingly long wait. With the forthcoming standalone Grand Theft Auto Online release, there's no better time for players to be able to access the game more quickly than they have been over the many years gone by.
Grand Theft Auto Online is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions are in development.
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Source: PC Gamer