Modder reduces GTA 5 loading times by 70 percent

[P4-630]

GTA 5 is one of the most popular games of all time. This game is not the newest, but despite that, it is still widely played.
Unfortunately, the game loading times are quite long at times.
According to an analysis of a modder, this is due to the fact that many of the tasks are handled by only one core of a processor during loading.
This creates a kind of traffic jam and the cycle to load takes far too long.

An example is that a text file is read with 63,000 lines. These rules are items that can be bought in a game and are matched with each character.
The modder indicates that, in the worst case, this would require 2 billion calculations. Even on the most modern hardware it takes a while.

The solution that the mud has realized is a new DLL. This means that no 63.00 tasks are needed, but only one.
According to the modder, 69.4 percent faster loading times can be achieved with this.

The modder has made the source for the DLL available on Github. So it still has to be compiled yourself.
Of course we must indicate that this is at your own risk.

Github (Source)
PCGH

 

[dont whant to set it"']

It was pretty much self-explanatory having tried the game installed and played from SATA3 HDD , SATA3 SSD and a fully capable pcie 3.0 nvme SSD .
Biggest difference was from HDD to SATA3 SSD , not so many improvements from SATA3 SSD to ~3GB/s read nvme SSD to game loading times.

So it's gotta be the game code not taking full advantage of the new gen hardware.

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

I read the source few days ago. It's not that the game doesn't take advantage of newer hardware. But the game does something before loading the map. Thus only CPU gets utilised while HDD/SSD stay dormant.

 

[dont whant to set it"']

Would the elephant in the room say it's to add some psychological gimmick to the game?

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

hat many of the tasks are handled by only one core of a processor during loading.

does this mean more cores, say Threadripper vs 11700k, mean even faster loading?

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

does this mean more cores, say Threadripper vs 11700k, mean even faster loading?

Means faster single core performance, faster the work done. I say work because it is not loading in the typical sense. Parsing buncha shit.

How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (nee.lv)

Down the rabbit hole​

Having borrowed my friend’s completely legitimate copy of the industry-standard disassembler (no, I really can’t afford the thing… gonna learn to ghidra one of these days) I went to take GTA apart.

That doesn’t look right at all. Most high-profile games come with built-in protection against reverse engineering to keep away pirates, cheaters, and modders. Not that it has ever stopped them.

There seems to be some sort of an obfuscation/encryption at play here that has replaced most instructions with gibberish. Not to worry, we simply need to dump the game’s memory while it’s executing the part we want to look at. The instructions have to be de-obfuscated before running one way or another. I had Process Dump lying around, so I used that, but there are plenty of other tools available to do this sort of thing.

Problem one: It’s… strlen?!​

Disassembling the now-less-obfuscated dump reveals that one of the addresses has a label pulled out of somewhere! It’s strlen? Going down the call stack the next one is labeled vscan_fn and after that the labels end, tho I’m fairly confident it’s sscanf.

It’s parsing something. Parsing what? Untangling the disassembly would take forever so I decided to dump some samples from the running process using x64dbg. Some debug-stepping later it turns out it’s… JSON! They’re parsing JSON. A whopping 10 megabytes worth of JSON with some 63k item entries.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

..., { "key": "WP_WCT_TINT_21_t2_v9_n2", "price": 45000, "statName": "CHAR_KIT_FM_PURCHASE20", "storageType": "BITFIELD", "bitShift": 7, "bitSize": 1, "category": ["CATEGORY_WEAPON_MOD"] }, ...

What is it? It appears to be data for a “net shop catalog” according to some references. I assume it contains a list of all the possible items and upgrades you can buy in GTA Online.

Clearing up some confusion: I beleive these are in-game money purchasable items, not directly linked with microtransactions.

But 10 megs? That’s nothing! And using sscanf may not be optimal but surely it’s not that bad? Well…

Yeah, that’s gonna take a while… To be fair I had no idea most sscanf implementations called strlen so I can’t blame the developer who wrote this. I would assume it just scanned byte by byte and could stop on a NULL.

Problem two: Let’s use a Hash- … Array?​

Turns out the second offender is called right next to the first one. They’re both even called in the same if statement as seen in this ugly decompilation:

All labels are mine, no idea what the functions/parameters are actually called.

The second problem? Right after parsing an item, it’s stored in an array (or an inlined C++ list? not sure). Each entry looks something like this:

1 2 3 4

struct { uint64_t *hash; item_t *item; } entry;

But before it’s stored? It checks the entire array, one by one, comparing the hash of the item to see if it’s in the list or not. With ~63k entries that’s (n^2+n)/2 = (63000^2+63000)/2 = 1984531500 checks if my math is right. Most of them useless. You have unique hashes why not use a hash map.

I named it hashmap while reversing but it’s clearly not_a_hashmap. And it gets even better. The hash-array-list-thing is empty before loading the JSON. And all of the items in the JSON are unique! They don’t even need to check if it’s in the list or not! They even have a function to directly insert the items! Just use that! Srsly, WAT!?

 

[Hardcore Games]

part of the problem is that GTA5 also checks servers for status which is why it is slow to load

SP games load fast from SSD