As promised, Rockstar Games has released a new update for GTA Online that incorporates t0st’s highly publicized fix for addressing the PC version’s lengthy loading times. The addition has been confirmed in Update 1.53’s patch notes, which include a thank you message to the coder for his work and a note about general network connectivity improvements for the console and PC versions of the popular open-world game. An updated test from t0st suggests that Rockstar’s official update can reduce loading times from the R* logo to GTA Online to just under 2 minutes, while PC Gamer and other testers on r/gtaonline have reported similarly speedy results.
“Our own Wes Fenlon timed that it used to take him three minutes and 15 seconds to get from launch to the in-game apartment, and a post-patch test is doing the same thing in two minutes,” PC Gamer reported. “Phil Savage tested it too and got an even more impressive result of just over a minute to load (though he hasn’t timed his old loads).”
“‘Insane. GTA menu -> GTA: Online. Dropped from 7 minutes to 1:57,’ writes user Ontyyy, who says they’re using an i7-2600k with a GTX 1070 and 16 GB RAM. Xim claims that their load times ‘dropped from 5-8 minutes to 35 seconds.’ Silent Prototipe saw it go ‘from 4-5 minutes to 1 a minute and 22 seconds.’ K1pone writes, ‘Loading time 2m 20s for online directly from Steam. Before it was like 8-10 minutes for me. Damn.’ Yash 217: “Went from 7 minutes to 2.5 minutes… This update might just get me back playing regularly.'”
As we noted in our previous coverage, t0st will be getting a handsome monetary reward of $10,000 for his work in identifying the issue behind GTA Online’s lengthy loading times. The reward stems from Rockstar Games’ bug bounty program, which is typically reserved for the discovery of security vulnerabilities.
GTAV Title Update 1.53 Notes (PS4 / Xbox One / PC)
[March 16, 2021] – General / Miscellaneous (PS4 / Xbox / PC)
- General network connectivity improvements
General / Miscellaneous (PC)
- Improvements to PC loading times *Thanks to t0st for his contributions around this part of today’s title update