A Grand Theft Auto player has cut down GTA Online's loading times by 70%, and they've explained how they achieved it in great detail.
Over on Nee.lv, user T0ST explains that they recently went to boot up GTA Online on their PC, and they were shocked to find that it was just as slow as when it came out over seven years ago. The user started delving into why the loading times could be so slow, and they dug up a lot of information.
The first issue T0ST outlines is a "bottleneck," in which the game uses a whole load of CPU power without really drawing from anywhere else on the system while the game boots up. They then discover that GTA Online is trying to read a specific kind of file, named JSON, but that its tool used to parse those files is "poorly built." Finally, there's an incredibly slow item de-duplication routine when booting up GTA Online, which checks over all of the thousands of in-game items one-by-one as the game boots up. All these factors combined means it consistently takes several minutes to boot up GTA Online even on high-end PCs.
