After Grand Theft Auto V received the Ill Gotten Gains Part 2 update, those playing the game on PC have been experiencing poor performance and frame-rate, however it may be down to Rockstar’s anti-modding protection mechanism.
The games performance has taken a hit thanks to the new update, however a possible explanation has surfaced and it is to do with modding protection. Spotted by Kotaku, the guys behind the LSPDFR (Los Santos Police Department First Response) mod have investigated the issue after their mod also took a substantial performance hit and found that included in the update were 3MB of junk code which they say is designed to confuse modders.
However instead of confusing modders, it is slowing them down and it seems that somewhere along the line this has intefered with both GTA Online and the single-player mode. This is because it is causing GTA V to access its scripts much slower, up to five times slower in some cases it is claimed, which is therefore causing frame-rate and performance issues. The game has to access scripts in order to simulate the world around you.
In a Facebook post posted over the weekend, LSPDFR stated, “In the latest update for GTA V, Ill Gotten Gains Part 2, Rockstar Games strengthened their protections against modding introduced in the first update. Included in this was a whopping 3 MB of junk code designed to confuse modders. Instead of the native functions of the game being accessible directly – we now have to jump through 4 or 5 hoops each time, as the game also implements live decryption and obfuscation methods. This severely impacts performance, resulting in gameplay at 3 frames per second – even on some of the strongest PC systems available today.”
LSPDFR also did a performance test where a function which took 585 milliseconds to be executed 1000 times in the previous patch, now took 2.5 seconds to execute it 1000 times, roughly five times longer.
Rockstar responded on its support page yesterday to reports of the poor performance stating they are looking to the issue.
“We have received reports of lower framerate in GTAV and GTA Online after Title Update 1.28 on PC, and we are looking into these reports now. If you would like to receive an automatic email notification as soon as there is more information, please log into the Support Site and click Subscribe at the top of this page.”