GTA Online modder finds way to make game load 70% faster

GTA Online loads painfully slowly, a well-known fact among fans. That's why it was a welcome surprise to much of the GTA community when a modder found a way to make the game load 70% faster.

One of the worst parts of GTA Online is the load times. It's a fantastic game by every other category, although there may be some subjective aspects people dislike about it. However, slow loading times are disgusting, and GTA Online is one of the worst offenders, especially compared to other modern online multiplayer games.

Players typically don't like waiting for loading screens. Fortunately for them, one modder has found a way to make the game load 70% faster. It's not a typo either; it's roughly 70% faster. That's a monumental difference, especially since he wants Rockstar Games to use his work in a future update for the convenience of GTA Online's playerbase.

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How the GTA Online modder made the game load 70% faster

A critical coding failure causes longer load times (Image via Rockstar Games Customer Support)

T0st is a GTA Online modder who claims to have found a critical failure in the game's code that causes longer than necessary load times.

The savvy modder used disassembly to figure out how GTA Online was loading so slow, as it took much longer than other AAA titles.

The disassembly of GTA Online's code

Some of the game's coding (Image via JetBrains)

T0st found that GTA Online loaded almost six times slower than GTA 5's single-player campaign, which still wasn't ideal.

He dumped the process stack as it was running in memory, where he noticed some functions weren't behaving as they should. Specifically, it was a JSON file involving the "net shop catalog."

More coding (Image via Advansity Education (YouTube))

The specific function related to it was using sscanf, which was very time-consuming as it had to read every piece of data. T0st eventually cached up the string values, which sped the load times up by 50%.

GTA Online also doesn't handle data in arrays efficiently. Instead of checking an entire array for possible duplicates, T0st used a hash table that could more quickly read data and find possible duplicates. Apparently, this helped reduce the load time by 25%. 25% and 50% isn't quite 70%, but it's still noticeably faster than what GTA Online players currently see.

Reducing the load times

Faster loading time means happier gamers! (Image via Rockstar Games)

Combining the two solutions doesn't provide a flat 70% reduction in load times, but it certainly improves it by a substantial amount. T0st even claimed that it wouldn't take Rockstar "... more than a day for a single dev to solve" if they implemented these solutions for faster loading screens.

Who knew that nearly 63,000 purchasable items and other data could be optimized so easily. The fixes are surprisingly easy to implement (if the player at least understands the technical jargon), so most fans are hoping that Rockstar will implement these new functions to drastically improve GTA Online's loading times.

70% or not, faster loading is always appreciated.

Will GTA Online incorporate this?

The ball is in Rickstar's court (Image via GTA Online Reddit)

There's no guarantee that Rockstar will ever incorporate methods like this to reduce loading times by 70% or so. While it's likely that fans will get some good news in the future, there's never a guarantee that it'll happen.

Players could even make an argument that faster loading screens would be one of the best updates in GTA Online, ever.