A very savvy programmer did some research and figured out there is a single thread bottleneck while loading into GTA 5 online mode.
GTA 5 is a masterpiece when it comes to its technical achievements. The amount of details that the developers at Rockstar managed to put into this title is extraordinary, to say the least. However, there is just one major problem that kind of gets in the way of players enjoying this game.
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Long loading times are a norm in GTA 5. However, the loading times are not great even with a PC that has modern hardware and SSD. This individual by the username kuroguro assumed something is not right as GTA 5 online takes way too long to load than its offline counterpart.
Following intensive troubleshooting, turns out, there is apparently a single thread CPU bottleneck while starting up GTA online. And the whole thing can be fixed with a small patch. The loading time improvements can be up to 69.4%, according to u/IndefiniteHypoaction.
This entire problem apparently can be fixed by a single developer at Rockstar within a single day. For like last 7 years, players had to endure unearthly long loading times in the online mode which was caused due to a minor mistake.
TL;DR
- There’s a single thread CPU bottleneck while starting up GTA Online
- It turns out GTA struggles to parse a 10MB JSON file
- The JSON parser itself is poorly built / naive and
- After parsing there’s a slow item de-duplication routine
For the fix along with the whole trouble shooting process click here.
Results following the fix
| 1 2 3 4 5 6 | Original online mode load time: ~6m flat Time with only duplication check patch: 4m 30s Time with only JSON parser patch: 2m 50s Time with both issues patched: 1m 50s (6*60 – (1*60+50)) / (6*60) = 69.4% load time improvement (nice!) |
However, this fix might only be feasible for certain hardware. And there can be different types of bottlenecks that can be found in different systems.
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This little bit of mistake wasted years of time from GTA online players. Hopefully, Rockstar can come up with an official fix soon.
