GTA Online is still very popular in 2021. And yet it suffers from a rather annoying problem: long loading times. However, a programmer now wants the Cause of the problem found and reduced it directly by a full 70 percent.
What’s the problem with GTA Online?
It is not uncommon for players to stare at the loading screens of GTA Online for six minutes or more. When the programmer ‘t0st’ got to the bottom of this problem, he claims to have noticed that the CPU load increases sharply after about a minute, while the network and hard disk are said to be barely loaded.
- What’s behind it? This leads him to the conclusion that something is running on the CPU and is only consuming a single core. In an in-depth investigation, he found out that the game reads a text file with all items in the game that can be purchased. It performs this process 63,000 times. After reading out each individual item, it also compares its digital fingerprint with each previously read out item.
- How much does your system charge? ‘t0st’ comes to the conclusion that GTA Online carries out a total of two billion checks, just to ensure that no item appears twice in the list that is finally read out. However, this is said to be a fruitless undertaking. Because at the beginning of the calculation the list is empty anyway and the file that is read does not have any duplicates. Accordingly, it is impossible from the outset that a duplicate can ever appear in the final list.
- Single player mode not affected: An important point that specifically indicates that this is a problem with the online mode is that the single player mode loads much faster than GTA Online. If the hardware itself were the cause, according to t0st this would also have to have such long loading times.
Thus one of the problems should have arisen, which for us is one of the biggest of the multiplayer mode of GTA 5.
The solution to the long loading times of GTA Online
‘t0st’ sat down and wrote a program to replace some of the game’s features. For example, the length of the item list should only be calculated once- instead of 63,000 times. With every further attempt in the game to query the value, the calculation is completely skipped and the already known value is retrieved from a cache.
At the same time, new items would simply be added to the list without first checking for duplicates. This should make the two billion reviews a thing of the past.
The result: According to the programmer himself, he was able to reduce the loading times on his system by a full 69.4 percent. Instead of over six minutes, GTA Online now load him a little under two minutes.
How do you use the fix?
However, using the workaround yourself is not that easy and requires skills in the scope of the command line. Because ‘tr0st’ uploaded the source code of the fix to github, but not a fully compiled version.
- Klont das Github-Archiv: git clone –recurse-submodules https://github.com/tostercx/GTAO_Booster_PoC
- Compile the code using MSVC
- Inject the DLL with a DLL injector while the game starts
Use caution: The fix itself acts like many cheats and hacks. As a result, Rockstar’s use of it could be viewed as an attempt at fraud, which could lead to your account being banned.
Is there an official fix coming from Rockstar?
According to the programmer, it will take a maximum of one to two days to implement this fix. The studio behind GTA Online has not yet commented on this problem. We have already asked for a comment and will update this news should the team get in touch.