When using glfwWaitEventsTimeout to cap framerate, it's somehow oddly throttled unless I move my mouse all the time

support
1

Not entirely sure how this works, but I’ll try to explain with some code snippets. But this is not framerate dropping on mouse input - it’s the opposite, I only get the framerate I want when I move the mouse.

This is on Windows, using glfw 3.3. I’m on an nvidia rtx 2070 if that matters. The application is compiled for dev, running in a debugger if it helps. This is using glfwSwapInterval 0.
In my update loop, I calculate all the frame timings after updating, rendering, and polling for events. Then I will try to sleep the thread using glfwWaitEventsTimeout to hit a steady, say, 100 fps.

update();
render();
glfwPollEvents();
current_frame_time = glfwGetTime();
delta_time = current_frame_time - prev_frame_time;
prev_frame_time = current_frame_time;
double desired_frametime = 1.0 / engine.fps_limit;
if (delta_time < desired_frametime) {
  double delay = desired_frametime - delta_time;
  glfwWaitEventsTimeout(delay);
}

If I log delta_time I get these weird inconsistencies.
If I just let the application run every other frame seems to be slow

[INFO] 0.012421
[INFO] 0.000877
[INFO] 0.013879
[INFO] 0.000822
[INFO] 0.015218
[INFO] 0.000836
[INFO] 0.014395
[INFO] 0.000888
[INFO] 0.014158
[INFO] 0.000853
[INFO] 0.014593
[INFO] 0.000847

But if I start waving the mouse around over the window, then the frame times are consistently 100 fps:
[INFO] 0.001996
[INFO] 0.001800
[INFO] 0.002243
[INFO] 0.001663
[INFO] 0.001982
[INFO] 0.002114
[INFO] 0.001891
[INFO] 0.002102
[INFO] 0.002079
[INFO] 0.002117
[INFO] 0.001741
[INFO] 0.002178
[INFO] 0.001988
[INFO] 0.001988

If I wave the mouse outside the window, it’s still the incorrect behavior. Only if I keep moving it in a steady motion over the window.

2

Welcome to the GLFW forum.

A few thoughts:

  1. Your code appears to be using both glfwPollEvents() and glfwWaitEventsTimeout() - I would recommend only using one.
  2. I would also log the variable delay along with the frame time to check that you are actually calculating the delay correctly.
  3. Waving your mouse around will generate events and so glfwWaitEventsTimeout will not wait for the timeout, it will simply return once it receives the event. So if you want to ensure a stable frame rate this won’t work reliably, instead you should use something like Sleep() or implement a loop around glfwWaitEventsTimeout checking the time against the desired end frame time.