The charging time of GTA V Online is very, very long, no matter how fast or powerful is your PC. The game world is large, complex and constantly updated, but should that mean that the loading time must be that long despite the fact that we are talking about a game that is almost six years old on PC?
This weekend a programmer named T0ST discovered a way to shorten the loading time of GTA Online by almost 70%, reducing the time we have to wait to enter the game from exactly six minutes to 1 minute and 50 seconds. This has been achieved using a fairly old PC, with an AMD FX-8350 processor and SSD storage, showing that Rockstar has not done its job well.
The problem of loading time in GTA V
GTA V Online is almost six years old now but it still receives constant updates, and for the new next-generation version on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X Rockstar should look for ways to make the game loading time much faster to do better. use of available hardware. This, in fact, is true for both PC and consoles.
A short summary of the problem is that GTA V has a single-threaded CPU bottleneck, and it struggles to work through a 10MB JSON file and then wastes time with an extremely slow data verification system than the one. T0ST programmer claims it is useless.
Since AMD's FX-8350 is a very underpowered processor by today's standards and offers poor single-threaded performance compared to Intel processors of that time, T0ST issues are less common on more modern systems. That said, the improved single-threaded performance on modern CPUs will still need to waste a lot of time on these same processes, making the T0ST fixes very valuable to Rockstar in their next efforts for GTA V Online.
The first of GTA Online's problems is that it has difficulty working with a 10MB JSON file that contains about 63,000 items. Interestingly, GTA V reads this file 63,000 times during loading time, resulting in a large amount of wasted time. While each read is very fast, flipping through the file 63,000 times adds up to a large number of wasted CPU cycles and creates longer load times than necessary.
The second problem with GTA Online is that the game also checks its calculations for repeated values, even though the JSON list does not contain them. Since the list has 63,000 values, T0ST believes that GTA Online needs to perform 1,984,531,500 cross-checks, all of which are useless. All entries in that file are unique, which completely eliminates the need for this cross-check.
To reduce GTA Online's loading time by nearly 70%, T0ST created two fixes that mitigate these issues, which it states should be considered by Rockstar. Given that GTA 5 has over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam on a daily basis, the time-saving benefits would be huge. If 100,000 players could load the game in 1 minute, the time savings would be 69.4 days.
The solution to the problem
T0ST's solution consists of two parts, both described on his blog. The first is a bypass of the game's duplication check, eliminating this unnecessary task. With this alone, it is possible to reduce the loading time by approximately 30%.
The second solution is a patch for the game's JSON parser, which caches the start and length of the JSON file. This change allows GTA Online to read the file once and view the cached response without having to reread the file, so instead of reading the file 63,000 times, it reads it once and caches it. This fix reduced the loading time of GTA V from six to two minutes and 50 seconds.
When both solutions are combined, the loading times were reduced from six minutes to one minute and fifty seconds, and that taking into account that the PC used is far from being fast and modern, so in a current gaming PC we could probably talk to load the game in just half a minute. The code for these fixes is available on Github, although GTA Online players should not use it as the anti-cheat system might see it as a cheat. This is precisely why Rockstar should implement these changes itself.
Rockstar, please fix your game
GTA Online is still incredibly popular on both PC and consoles even though it is now six years old, and T0ST claims its fixes could be implemented by a single Rockstar developer in a single day, so the effort would be minimal. especially considering the benefits. With this in mind, Rockstar should consider the implementation of this solution a no-brainer.
The shorter load times are sure to attract more PC gamers to play again, and existing players will benefit from a much shorter load time and therefore more actual game time.
If these corrections can also be brought to the console, and especially to the new generation, the saving of human time combining these corrections would be even more considerable. The faster loading times for the new version on next-gen consoles would certainly be a huge improvement for everyone.
0 Comments