Wow, many people argue how optimized GTA was and then this. I wonder how much money they lost because of this. I often stopped playing because it just took too long to load.
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I've seen this happen with some other games which are not the best optimised for PCs, but the fans will still defend the developers, just because they like the brand
And just thinking about the size of the game and popularity, to make it work at all, requires some skill. Which makes the OP even more unbelievable.
Even "rebels", who supposedly relish having fringe tastes, want other rebels to approve of their tastes.
The more strongly you stake your identity as "fan of X", the more social disapproval of X hurts.
This... this is GTA online. It's a cash cow designed to suck cash out of your pocket. Ads for things you can spend your money on are shown while "connecting", so if this delay wasn't introduced intentionally, it sure isn't a high priority fix. The code isn't part of the optimised, streamlined, interactive part of the game, it's part of the menu and loader system.
Most of these online games/services have so-called "whales" that contribute most if not all of the income the platform makes. If these whales are willing to spend the wads of cash they throw at the platform, they won't even care for another five minutes of ads. The amounts of cash some of these people spend is obscene; the millions Take Two profit from GTA every year are generally generated by only a tiny (usually a single number percentage) of the total player base.
In the end, I doubt they've lost much money on this. They might've even made some from the extra ads.
GTA Online is a huge, enormously buggy and slow mess that will generally struggle to run at 80 fps on a top-of-the-line 2020 system (think 10900K at over 5 GHz with a 3090) and will almost never cross the 120 fps threshold no matter how fast your system is and how low the settings are.
I’m really confused as to why games are determining anything whatsoever based on the refresh rate of the screen.
Skyrim has this same problem and not being able to play over 60fps is the reason I haven’t touched the game in years.
Generally, a AAA console game will target 30hz or 60hz. Therefore the timing loop is built to serve updates at a steady pace of 30 or 60, with limiting if it goes faster. Many game engines also interpolate animations separately from the rest of the gameplay, allowing them to float at different refresh rates. Many game engines further will also decouple AI routine tick rates from physics to spread out the load. Many game engines now also interleave updates and kick off the next frame before the first is complete, using clever buffering and multithreaded job code. All told, timing in games is one of those hazard zones where the dependencies are both numerous and invisible.
When you bring this piece of intricate engineering over to PC and crank up the numbers, you hit edge cases. Things break. It's usually possible to rework the design to get better framerate independence, but doing do would be invasive - you'd be changing assumptions that are now baked into the content. It isn't just fixing one routine.
It's easy to forget that GTA5/GTA:O was originally a 360/PS3 game, getting a game of that scope running at all on a system with just 256MB of RAM and VRAM was an incredible achievement.
The A-Team developers who made that happen were probably moved over to Red Dead Redemption 2 though, with GTA5s long tail being handled by the B-Team.
If you then try to run the simulation in parallel with the rendering (rather than between some frames) it is even more work, since inter-thread communication is hard.
This stuff might seem easy for very good programmers, however on a game you want to hire a wide range of programmer skill and "game-play programmers" tend to be weaker on the pure programming front (their skills lie elsewhere)
For example, my backend Java guys struggled heavily with JSON mappers. It took them forever to apply changes safely. My department consumes a lot of data from backend systems and we have to aggregate and transform them. Unfortunately the consumed structure changes often.
While a JSON mapper in our case in JAVA was sort of exceptionally hard to handle, a simple NodeJS layer in JavaScript did the job exceptionally easy and fast. So we used a small NodeJS layer to handle the mapping instead of doing this in Java.
Moral of the story: Sometimes there are better tools outside your view. And this seems to be many times the case for JSON. JSON means JavaScript Object Notation. It is still tough for OO languages to handle.
This is my observation.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/34705 >Refresh rate uncap for exclusive fullscreen mode.