A GTA Online modder recently made a momentous discovery in why the game took so long to load even on fast, modern PCs. Making just one change to the file system ended up reducing load times for some by up to 70%. It wasn't a fluke either, and Rockstar has awarded the person responsible with a cool $10,000 for their trouble.
GTA V Online loading times have been notoriously bad for years, taking minutes for some to actually get online, despite major advances in PC hardware since the games original 2013 release, and the game has been continuously updated too. It turns out that a major reason for it was one problematic JSON file, which could only be tackled by one CPU thread and completely bottlenecked the loading process.
A modder by the name of t0st managed to remove this unnecessary file and cut loading times for some, by up to whole minutes. In the original release, t0st said that if anyone at Rockstar was listening, they should remove it too.
That's now going to happen in an official patch and Rockstar has awarded t0st $10,0000 as part of its bug bounty program which is usually reserved for security breaches and exploits.
"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. As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update," Rockstar said in a statement to PCGamer.
No word yet on when the update will be released, but in the meantime you can make use of the t0st mod, here.