Question

How does XNA maintain a consistent and precise 60 FPS frame rate? Additionally, how does it maintain such precise timing without pegging the CPU at 100%?

Answer 1

I don’t know specifically how XNA does it but when playing around with OpenGL a few years ago I accomplished the same thing using some very simple code.

at the core of it i assume XNA has some sort of rendering loop, it may or may not be integrated with a standard even processing loop but for the sake of example lets assume it isn’t. in this case you could write it some thing like this.

TimeSpan FrameInterval =  TimeSpan.FromMillis(1000.0/60.0);
DateTime PrevFrameTime = DateTime.MinValue;
while(true)
{
    DateTime CurrentFrameTime = DateTime.Now;
    TimeSpan diff = DateTime.Now - PrevFrameTime;
    if(diff < FrameInterval)
    {
        DrawScene();
        PrevFrameTime = CurrentFrameTime;
    }
    else
    {
        Thread.Sleep(FrameInterval - diff);
    }
}

In reality you would probably use something like Environment.Ticks instead of DateTimes (it would be more accurate), but i think that this illustrates the point. This should only call drawScene about 60 times a second, and the rest of the time the thread will be sleeping so it will not incur any CPU time.