Lately I’ve been working on a project at work and the application was performing pretty well. The CPU Usage was below 2% and I was quite happy with it. Then I decided to add a simple animation that continues executing forever… the results 15% CPU consumption … I was amazed at how much CPU was being wasted. Yet I am a stubborn guy and if I want an animation to execute forever, I will do it no matter what….
I started researching and I found out that WPF animations by default try to serve a 60 frames per second… Which is quite a lot!!! After having a chat with my friend ( and role model ) DR.WPF, it was all clear. (Thanks Dr for all the help you give me !!!)
So in order to reduce the frame rate per second (thus reducing CPU usage), all you need to do is to override the property meta data of the Dependency property Timeline.DesiredFrameRateProperty…. So basically all you need is 1 line of code (I usually put this code on startup of the application)
1: Timeline.DesiredFrameRateProperty.OverrideMetadata(
2: typeof(Timeline),
3: new FrameworkPropertyMetadata { DefaultValue = 20 }
4: );
Yep, that’s it… Amazing but true…. I managed to make an application that was consuming 15% CPU to consume 2% CPU….
With regards to what frame rate should you use, I would leave that to you…. This depends on how smooth you want your animations to perform… Yet for me 20 is working quite fine…
Hope this helps
Great work!
coolio
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Thanks, some of my projects can really use this one to.
Hi Marlon,
Great article, well done!!!
Rudi Grobler
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Marlon,
Very nice!
Cheers,
Karl
Hi!
I have been prove it and it works perfectly!!
It was great… pass from 20% cpu usage to 10%…5%…
thanks!!!
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thanks! that helped a lot, specially when testing the app in a virtual machine.
Hi,
I have a window without borders and transparencykey is true due to which the window gets its elliptical shape. I have a simple animation where I’m changing the opacity of an image and the repeatbehavior is forever. The CPU consumption is above 80% even after implementing your solution. Is there another way of bringing the CPU usage down?
Thanks in advance!!
HI , This is very clear and elaboratice article on FPS. I appreciate your step to share and guide others.
Zahid
谢谢,太棒了
Thx, Good job!
Saved my day.
where am I to put this code? I tried putting at the start of Main windows definition I had compile errors. I tried at the beginning of the rotation method (before all the rotations started) and I got an exception. What should I do???
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There is no “Timeline” available in the application startup.