A PC-savvy GTA Online player has found out why the game loads so slowly

There are a few things that will always be true in GTA: Online. There’s something new to buy, players in oppressors will always ruin your day, and finally, the game will take far, far too long to load. Since its 2013 launch, load times for GTA: Online haven’t gotten any better either. Even on PC, GTA V’s online component can take upwards of three minutes to load. A PC-savvy fan has discovered just why that is and decided to fix the problem themselves, making the game load nearly 70% faster.

The user, who goes by the name T0ST, detailed their findings in a lengthy post laden with technical jargon. They first compared the load times for GTA V’s single-player and GTA: Online, discovering that GTA: Online took up to six times longer to load. Using Task Manager, they began to investigate the source of the bottleneck, slowing load times down. As it turns out, GTA: Online was maxing out a single core on their eight-core CPU while using no other resources. To T0ST, this all pointed to one thing: “Really bad code.”

After using several programs to pick through the code running while GTA: Online loads, T0ST discovered that the issue was one file, in particular, a JSON. This JSON holds 10MB of item entries, and upon loading into GTA: Online, the game’s code would read through it in an extremely unoptimized manner. T0ST decided to fix the problem by writing their own code and injecting it into the game. Once implemented, their load time for GTA: Online went from six minutes to just under two.

T0ST’s post ends asking Rockstar to fix the issue. According to them, “the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve.” If the gaming giant does manage to see this post and get someone on the job, load times for players across platforms could improve.