Seven Years of Loading Screens, Fixed by One Fan

A slow load nobody had explained

GTA Online launched in 2013 with Grand Theft Auto V, which Take-Two reported had passed one billion dollars in retail sales in its first three days. In February 2021 a programmer publishing as t0st wrote that the online mode still loaded as slowly as it had seven years earlier. On his own PC the story mode loaded in about a minute and ten seconds and the online mode in about six minutes. He had no access to the source code.

Measuring instead of assuming

He watched what the running game was doing. After the shared resources loaded, one processor core ran flat out for about four minutes and did nothing else. The work was parsing a ten megabyte text file describing some 63,000 purchasable in-game items. The parser re-measured the length of the remaining text for every value it read, and a second routine checked each parsed item against every item already stored. Neither produced a wrong result. Both grew punishing as the list grew.

A small patch that bypassed the two routines cut his load from about six minutes to one minute fifty seconds, a 69.4 percent improvement on his machine. His post notes that faster PCs loaded in about two minutes to begin with, and a poll he cites suggested most respondents waited more than three minutes. The six minute figure is his measurement, not a fleet average.

Rockstar's response

Rockstar told PC Gamer that an investigation had confirmed t0st revealed an aspect of the PC version's code related to load times that could be improved, and that changes would ship in a forthcoming title update. The update arrived on 16 March 2021 with "Improvements to PC loading times" and a note thanking t0st for his contributions. Rockstar paid him 10,000 dollars through its bug bounty programme, which is normally reserved for security and privacy issues; t0st said the award was made as an exception. The fix was scoped to PC. Console players received only network connectivity improvements in the same update.

What the record supports

The record does not say why the routine survived for seven years, and nothing published describes Rockstar's own profiling. What it does show is that the cost was measurable from outside with standard tools, and that two routines which were correct at small sizes scaled badly with data that had grown for years. Profile the running system before accepting that slow is inherent, test at production data sizes, and keep a path open for outsiders who arrive with evidence.