Fixing the Long overdue GTA V Loading Times
On September 17, 2013, Grand Theft Auto V by Rockstar Games was released to the public of gamers waiting for it. Not long after its success went on with significant updates that included missions, new vehicles, and new content overall for the game’s online community, and while users enjoyed the Single-Player mode with mods that increased, as have other Rockstar Games releases, the online part of GTAV had its issues going from cheaters to long loading times. While the case was on rockstars scopes for some time, it only seemed to of gotten worse as time went by with Rockstars game updates with new content. After a few years, the online community grew more and more, but the loading times to get into a server grew too, at times even over twenty minutes. After jokes about the loading times went on seven-plus years later after GTAV’s initial release, a modder by the name of T0st got back into the game and thought about trying to fix the issue at hand.
The modder T0st made an in-depth recon on GTAV’s loading times by breaking down the times between different computer hardware and console hardware to compare the differences between loading times. Testing on a moderate machine with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 as his GPU and an AMD FX-8350 as his CPU, T0st managed to get an online loading time six minutes flat and around one minute when going into the games story mode. In his main findings that he posted on his website, T0st breaks down that the CPUs were causing the main issues with GTAV’s loading times with a bit of in-depth CPU core research.
After a push of social media hype and outrage to get Rockstars’ attention, the gaming company reached out to T0st to ensure the game’s loading times got fixed. With the recent update by Rockstar as of March 16, 2021, they pushed out Update 1.53 to the GTAV Title stating the following:
[March 16, 2021] – General / Miscellaneous (PS4 / Xbox / PC)
General network connectivity improvements
General / Miscellaneous (PC)
Improvements to PC loading times *Thanks to t0st for his contributions around this part of today’s title update”
After the GTAV update, T0st went back to the drawing board and confirmed that the update in fact worked, taking his earlier mentioned six-minute loading time into the game’s online mode to just shy of two minutes. Cutting the times by nearly seventy percent. After the talk with Rockstar, T0st was granted a $10k in-game bounty finder award, that the game company issues for security issues most of the time, but seeing that this great modder was able to fix what seven years of development wasn’t able to do I would say that $10k maybe a little shy of what it should be, knowing what Rockstar Games is worth. But nonetheless, loading times are fixed, and here we are hoping that this update will just be the first that GTAV will implement before the game’s sixth release, cross our fingers for that day.
