GTA Online player explains how they cut load times down by 70%

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.

T0ST rounds out their post by appealing to Rockstar Games for a fix, saying that it could likely be solved by a single developer in around a day. What's more, they've even provided recommendations for the fix to significantly cut down the loading times, and have said they might do some more writing like this in the future since the popularity of their findings has completely taken off.

We'll have to see if GTA Online's loading times are still as bad when a native PS5 port for the game arrives later this year. Last year, Rockstar announced an "expanded and enhanced" PS5 port for GTA 5 and GTA Online, and while we're still yet to hear any concrete details of what the port will improve on, Rockstar hasn't ruled out a release for the upgraded edition of their 2013 game on the Xbox Series X.

To see all the latest changes Rockstar has made and implemented into the online game, head over to our GTA Online patch notes guide for more.