Rockstar Games has paid $10,000 to a modder who cut down GTA Online load times by 70%. GTA Online has been known for long load times all throughout its existence with the release of GTA 5 7 years ago. While Rockstar Games had basically done nothing in particular to fix it, a modder by the name of t0st began investigating the issue and came up with a solution that significantly reduced load times.
Last month t0st detailed how he cut GTA Online load times by 70% by solving the main problems causing the CPU bottleneck when starting up the game. In a very detailed post where the modder looked at every angle into the game files, t0st found that a single thread CPU bottleneck was causing the long load times.
According to t0st, GTA struggles to parse a 10MB JSON file which is poorly built, while also mentioning that the whole fix shouldn’t even take more than a day for a developer to solve.
Soon after the long post by t0st, reports started coming of Rockstar Games confirming that the solution posted by t0st works to reduce load times, while also confirming the fix to be coming soon with an update
In a statement to PC Gamer, Rockstar Games said,
After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved. As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.
On the other hand t0st updated the original post where he has just confirmed that Rockstar has awarded him with $10,000 for the solution. t0st also mentions that the reward comes as an exception to Rockstar’s Bug Bounty program. This program gives out rewards to anyone that finds security or privacy issues in Rockstar’s online games.
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