Rockstar Games has opted to implement an unofficial, fan-made bug fix for Grand Theft Auto Online that can reduce the loading times of the popular open-world multiplayer title by as much as 70 percent. The news comes from the solution’s creator, t0st, who updated their original analysis with a confirmation that Rockstar would be adding the fix to the game soon. The developer declined to provide any additional technical details on the subject, however.
“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 delivered to PC Gamer. “As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update.”
“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,” PC gamer noted. “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 isn’t clear when Rockstar Games will add t0st’s loading time fix for Grand Theft Auto Online, but what we do know is that the user will be getting a $10,000 reward for their efforts as part of the publisher’s bug bounty program. This is generally awarded for newly discovered security vulnerabilities, but t0st’s discovery was evidently meaningful enough for Rockstar to make an exception.