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GTA Online - Loading Times Fixed (Finally!)

We've finally got a fix for those excruciatingly long load times coming.

By Chris Wilkinson Tue 23 Mar, 2021 3:44 PM - Last Updated: Tue 23 Mar, 2021 4:03 PM
Grand Theft Auto 5 has been one of the biggest GTA games in the franchise and has often been cited as the gold standard for multiplayer integration. GTA IV and San Andreas did feature a Multiplayer element to it, but GTA V really solidified it as part of the experience.

When this was first released, there were a number of jobs which you could do with the heists being promised for some time before they were finally delivered, however, aside from the other players who take the utmost glee in going around killing people just trying to make a few dollars, one of the biggest problems this game faced was its long loading times.

With each patch, each new expansion to the online world, be it cars, weapons, or new places to visit, the loading times get substantially worse. It didn’t matter whether you were playing on a console or on the PC, you could be waiting for up to 6 minutes to get into the game. This was frustrating, especially when you’re kicked out of the game and all you want to do is play with your mates. However, within this past month there was a fix found for this long running, “bug”, and it comes to us courtesy of t0st who got sick of these longer load times and decided to look into it.

The results were found not to be due to how GTA Online checked all of the items in the game, as had been theorized, but instead, due to how it had been programmed. It seems it was processing these checks almost 2 billion times, which simply wasn’t required. t0st looked at how it ran this through just a single core of the computer, and began to work on a .dll file which would reduce the number of redundant checks.

As part of this testing, he found that this reduced the load times to under 2 minutes which is a substantial improvement over the base game itself which I know for someone like me, is important when you want to get into the game quickly.

Since this which was originally reported a couple of weeks ago the fix was submitted to Rockstar who’ve been looking over it. In the past couple of days, they’ve come back to confirm that this fix does work and they’re going to be working to incorporate it into the next major game release.

This is important as it means that everyone's going to benefit from the hard work of this gentleman, although for his work he’s being given $10,000 from the bug bounty fund which is normally for security issues.

I hope that t0st continues to look for issues like this to help improve the game for everyone. I also hope this makes its way to consoles as well, as it’ll make the game better for those players, for sure.


What do you think about player involvement on this level? Was Rockstar right in assigning a $10,000 value to t0st's contribution? Let us know in the comments?


WRITTEN BY Chris Wilkinson
EDITED BY Silek
5 Comments
Tue 23 Mar, 2021 3:48 PM
Took a modder to find a solution but big on Rockstar to actually look through it and incorporate it. My man Sammy tells me apparently the dude got paid for his service too, so that's amazing of Rockstar!
Tue 23 Mar, 2021 3:59 PM
$10,000 is a nice chunk. Great article Chris.
Tue 23 Mar, 2021 5:24 PM
A very interesting article!
Tue 23 Mar, 2021 6:16 PM
GTA, that has been a long time since I played that one. I even remember playing the very first version when it came out. It turned out to be a great game.
Tue 23 Mar, 2021 7:16 PM
For the curious, https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-...g-times-by-70/ is the website where he posted his findings. It's a technical but very interesting read!