GTA Online is notorious for its long loading times. And, surprisingly enough, a modder was able to improve loading times by 70% on an AMD FX-8350, showcasing some of the game’s optimization issues.
According to “T0ST“, there’s a single-thread CPU bottleneck while starting up GTA Online that will affect most mid/low tier CPUs. Moreover, it appears that GTA struggles to parse a 10MB JSON file. Not only that, but the JSON parser itself is poorly built/naive and after parsing there’s a slow item de-duplication routine.
The modder was able to address these issues and has improved loading times by 70% on his system. The PC system that T0ST used was an AMD FX-8350 with a KINGSTON SA400S37120G, 2X Kingston 8192 MB (DDR3-1337) and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070.
In order to improve the game’s loading times, T0ST wrote a .dll, injected it in GTA, and hooked some functions. What’s also really cool here is that T0ST has shared the source of PoC (which you can download from here). Therefore, PC gamers can now enjoy shorter loading times while loading GTA Online. Do note, however, that your results may vary, and you may not see that big of a boost (especially if you’re using a high-end system).
Lastly, T0ST urges Rockstar to fix these issues. After all, and as he says, these problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve.
Have fun!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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