GTA Online will finally load faster thanks to a player
People might have some stereotypes and preconceived notions of how game developers look and work but, as with any such concepts, reality is far different and sometimes even stranger. True, these are professionals in their trade but even pros do make mistakes or overlook some things, especially when there are many cooks involved. Sometimes, it may take a fresh pair of eyes to actually pinpoint some performance problem and, fortunately for both players of GTA Online and one particular programmer, Rocksteady was more than willing to own up to the error.
As an online game, some would presume that GTA Online would offload at least some of the workload to remote servers. Even if it still needed to do some number crunching on the player's side, powerful PCs should make short work of that. Unfortunately, the experience of the online version of the famous and notorious Grand Theft Auto franchise was the exact opposite but, fortunately, the fix was relatively simple.
In fact, alone programmer by the name of t0st figured out what was causing GTA Online to load very slowly even on beefy rigs. Apparently, the game was utilizing just a single thread of execution on the CPU, something that is quite antiquated given the multi-core, multi-threaded nature of even the least powerful processors today. That apparently was the single bottleneck that caused the game to load slowly even if the rest of the game performs as expected.
The good news is that GTA Online developer Rockstar confirmed that it was indeed the case and that a fix would be coming to address that. Although it might be oversimplifying the amount of work needed to implement the fix and make sure it has no adverse side effects, it at least now gives players hope that it won't take months to address that issue.
Even better news is that t0st is apparently being rewarded for figuring out this bug. Rockstar confirmed that a bounty worth $10,000 is being given to the programmer, a prize that is usually reserved only for security or privacy bugs.