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Asked: 2026-05-15T17:25:14+00:00

I have a basic question regarding timers. My timer is acting very strange. I

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I have a basic question regarding timers. My timer is acting very strange. I am trying to make the tick occur every millisecond to update my data. I can get it to work with seconds, it seems, but not milliseconds..

I am using WPF and am wondering why the following is not functioning correctly.

It appears that the “second” countdown works correctly, but while using the same procedure and editing one value, it does not “tick” correctly it seems.

I am trying to make a millisecond countdown using the following:

            //TimeSpan temp0 = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 1);
        CountdownTimer = new DispatcherTimer();
        CountdownTimer.Tick += new EventHandler(Countdowntimer_Tick);
        CountdownTimer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.0);//temp0;

The above seems like it works fine for a “second” countdown, but I need more precision, so I do the following:

            //TimeSpan temp0 = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 1);
        IntroCountdownTimer = new DispatcherTimer();
        IntroCountdownTimer.Tick += new EventHandler(Countdowntimer_Tick);
        IntroCountdownTimer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.001);//temp0;

This would give us millisecond precision, BUT, when I try this in my program, it is much much slower. Any ideas why?

    void Countdowntimer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        m_dIntroCountdown -= 1.0;
    }

ps: I do set the “m_dIntroCountdown accordingly. If we are in milliseconds, I set it to 5000.0, if in seconds, 5.0

Maybe I am looking too much into this.. any ideas?

All help is appreciated.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What do you want the resolution for? If you are just trying to keep track of time, use System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch. It has ~10ns resolution.

    A 1 ms time resolution is way too fine for what WPF can handle. Even at 120 fps (which is high), you will only get 8.3 ms resolution. In order to update at 1ms, you’d need to render 1000 frames per second. This is just beyond the limits of any modern system. Even the human eye starts to lose track of discontinuous changes in motion at ~10ms.

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