Rockstar awards $10K bounty to GTA Online player who solved load time issue

Rockstar has awarded $10,000 to a GTA Online player who found a way to reduce the game's load times on PC by up to 70 percent. 

Earlier this month, Github user 'tostercx' (a.k.a. 't0st') revealed they'd managed to shrink GTA Online's mammoth load times by addressing a "single thread GTA bottleneck" that occurs when starting up the title. 

T0st posted a detailed write-up of their solution online for devs interested in their methodology, and explained the problem itself "shouldn't take more than one day for a single dev to solve."

"Most likely, this won’t solve everyone’s load times -- there might be other bottlenecks on different systems, but it’s such a gaping hole that I have no idea how Rockstar has missed it all these years," said t0st.

"[Rockstar] could either switch to a hashmap for the de-duplication or completely skip it on startup as a faster fix. For the JSON parser - just swap out the library for a more performant one. I don’t think there’s any easier way out."

Now, as highlighted by PC Gamer, Rockstar has confirmed t0st's solution is workable and pledged to officially implement the fix as part of a future update.

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

The studio also decided to hand over $10,000 to t0st for solving the issue. The cash was awarded through Rockstar's bug bounty program, normally reserved for security issues, as an 'exceptional' case.