Rockstar thanks GTA Online player who fixed poor load times, official update coming

Rockstar Games has confirmed to PC Gamer that a fan-made solution to GTA Online's abysmal loading times will become official in a forthcoming update.

At the beginning of March, Github user tostercx, who also goes by t0st, claimed they'd discovered a way to reduce GTA Online's loading times by up to 70 percent. Further, they also released a fix that you can pick up here—with a caveat that it's an unsupported "proof of concept, not for casual use.”

For those interested in the technical angles of such things, tostercx also wrote up a detailed analysis of what was wrong, and how they’d fixed it. It's fairly technical, but the short version is that the slowdown was being caused by "a single thread CPU bottleneck while starting up GTA Online,” a problem they estimated "shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve."

It actually took a somewhat longer than that, but Rockstar has confirmed that tostercx's findings were accurate, and that a fix is on the way.

"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," the company said in a statement. "As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update."

Rockstar didn't say when the fix might become available, nor did it confirm t0st's estimation of a 70 percent reduction in load times. It did confirm that the company has been in touch with t0st, however, "and would like to thank him again for his efforts." Hopefully it also threw a truckload or two of GTA$ his way—or even better, some of that sweet (and real) Rockstar Bug Bounty cash.

Update: Shortly after Rockstar confirmed that a load time fix is in the works, tostercx said that they were in fact awarded $10,000 through its Bug Bounty program. That's normally reserved for discovering security or privacy issues in Rockstar's online games, but the studio decided to award the bounty "as an exception" in this case, they said. Rockstar confirmed to PC Gamer that the payment is being made.