As this page is outdated, please refer to Bevy's official migration guides while reading, to cover the differences: 0.14 to 0.15, 0.15 to 0.16.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I will update the page as soon as I find the time.

Jittering Time, Choppy Movement/Animation

Fixed Timestep

Gameplay movement/simulation code is typically run on a fixed timestep (in the FixedUpdate schedule). This is important to make sure these computations happen consistently and correctly, regardless of display framerate.

However, obviously, that means they do not follow the display's frame rate. This causes movement to look choppy on-screen.

The solution to this problem is transform interpolation/extrapolation.

Bevy Time vs. Rust/OS time

Do not use std::time::Instant::now() to get the current time. Get your timing information from Bevy, using Res<Time>.

Rust (and the OS) give you the precise time of the moment you call that function. However, that's not what you want.

Your game systems are run by Bevy's parallel scheduler, which means that they could be called at vastly different instants every frame! This will result in inconsistent / jittery timings and make your game misbehave or look stuttery.

Bevy's Time gives you timing information that is consistent throughout the frame update cycle. It is intended to be used for game logic.

This is not Bevy-specific, but applies to game development in general. Always get your time from your game engine, not from your programming language or operating system.

Imprecise Frame Delta Time

That said, it is actually often impossible for any game engine (not just Bevy) to give precise values for the frame delta time.

The time when the final rendered frame is actually displayed on-screen is called "presentation time". On most OSs, there is no API to measure that. The game engine does not know when the user can actually see the rendered frame produced by the GPU.

Therefore, the frame time must be measured differently. Typically, what is measured is the time between runs of the game engine's main frame update loop on the CPU. Bevy measures its timings at the point when GPU work is submitted to the GPU for processing.

This is a good approximation, but it will never perfectly match reality.

If you run with VSync on a 60Hz display, you would expect every frame delta to be exactly 16.667ms. But if you log the delta time values from Bevy, you will see that they vary. They are close, but never exactly that value.

There is no known complete solution to this. Bevy developers are investigating ways to improve the quality of Bevy's time measurements.