High precision sleep or How to yield CPU and maintain precise frame rate

Question

I work on a 2D game engine that has a function called LimitFrameRate to ensure that the game does not run so fast that a user cannot play the game. In this game engine the speed of the game is tied to the frame rate. So generally one wants to limit the frame rate to about 60 fps. The code of this function is relatively simple: calculate the amount of time remaining before we should start work on the next frame, convert that to milliseconds, sleep for that number of milliseconds (which may be 0), repeat until it's exactly the right time, then exit. Here's the code:

public virtual void LimitFrameRate(int fps)
{
  long freq;
  long frame;
  freq = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.Frequency;
  frame = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();
  while ((frame - previousFrame) * fps < freq)
  {
     int sleepTime = (int)((previousFrame * fps + freq - frame * fps) * 1000 / (freq * fps));
     System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(sleepTime);
     frame = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();
  }
  previousFrame = frame;
}

Of course I have found that due to the imprecise nature of the sleep function on some systems, the frame rate comes out quite differently than expected. The precision of the sleep function is only about 15 milliseconds, so you can't wait less than that. The strange thing is that some systems achieve a perfect frame rate with this code and can achieve a range of frame rates perfectly. But other systems don't. I can remove the sleep function and then the other systems will achieve the frame rate, but then they hog the CPU.

I have read other articles about the sleep function:

• Sleep function in c in windows. Does a function with better precision exist?
• Sleep Function Error In C

What's a coder to do? I'm not asking for a guaranteed frame rate (or guaranteed sleep time, in other words), just a general behavior. I would like to be able to sleep (for example) 7 milliseconds to yield some CPU to the OS and have it generally return control in 7 milliseconds or less (so long as it gets some of its CPU time back), and if it takes more sometimes, that's OK. So my questions are as follows:

1. Why does sleep work perfectly and precisely in some Windows environments and not in others? (Is there some way to get the same behavior in all environments?)
2. How to I achieve a generally precise frame rate without hogging the CPU from C# code?

Answer 1

You can use timeBeginPeriod to increase the timer/sleep accuracy. Note that this globally affects the system and might increase the power consumption.
You can call timeBeginPeriod(1) at the beginning of your program. On the systems where you observed the higher timer accuracy another running program probably did that.
And I wouldn't bother calculating the sleep time and just use sleep(1) in a loop.

But even with only 16ms precision you can write your code so that the error averages out over time. That's what I'd do. Isn't hard to code and should work with few adaptions to your current code.

Or you can switch to code that makes the movement proportional to the elapsed time. But even in this case you should implement a frame-rate limiter so you don't get uselessly high framerates and unnecessarily consume power.

Edit: Based on ideas and comments in this answer, the accepted answer was formulated.

Answer 2

Almost all game engines handle updates by passing the time since last frame and having movement etc... behave proportionally to time, any other implementation than this is faulty.

Although CodeInChaos suggestion is answers your question, and might work partially in some scenarios it's just a plain bad practice.

Limiting the framerate to your desired 60fps will work only when a computer is running faster. However the second that a background task eats up some processor power (for example the virusscanner starts) and your game drops below 60fps everything will go much slower. Even though your game could be perfectly playable on 35fps this will make it impossible to play the game because everything goes half as fast.

Things like sleep are not going to help because they halt your process in favor of another process, that process must first be halted, sleep(1ms) just means that after 1ms your process is returned to the queue waiting for permission to run, sleep(1ms) therefor can easily take 15ms depending on the other running processes and their priorities.

So my suggestions is that you as quickly as possible at some sort of "elapsedSeconds" variable that you use in all your update methods, the earlier you built it in, the less work it is, this will also ensure compatibility with MONO.

If you have 2 parts of your engine, say a physics and a render engine and you want to run these at different framerates, then just see how much time has passed since the last frame, and then decide to update the physics engine or not, as long as you incorporate the time since last update in your calculations you will be fine.

Also never draw more often than you're moving something. It's a waste to draw 2 times the exact same screen, so if the only way something can change on screen is by updating your physics engine, then keep render engine and physics engine updates in sync.