A way to get the number of milliseconds in real time passed since the last call of a method

Question

I'm calling an update function to draw a real time simulation and was wondering if there was an effective way to get the number of milliseconds passed since the last update? At the moment I have a DispatchTimer calling at regular intervals to update the simulation but the timing isn't accurate enough and ends up being about 60% slower than it should be (it varies).

Answer 1

I would use Stopwatch.GetTimestamp() to get a tick count, then compare the value before and after. You can convert this to timings by:

var startTicks = Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();
// Do stuff
var ticks = Stopwatch.GetTimestamp() - startTicks;

double seconds = ticks / Stopwatch.Frequency;
double milliseconds = (ticks / Stopwatch.Frequency) * 1000;
double nanoseconds = (ticks / Stopwatch.Frequency) * 1000000000;

You could also use var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); and sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds afterwards if you just want to time different chunks of code.