Maybe because (IMHO) high precision timers (interrupts or events) on Windows are still an imprecise mess. It's quite painful in kernel mode to rely on a timer

Maybe because (IMHO) high precision timers (interrupts or events) on Windows are still an imprecise mess. It's quite painful in kernel mode to rely on a timer that ticks once per 16.5 ms or so. See KeSetTimerEx: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff553292(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff.... You can of course change timer tick frequency to, say, 1 ms, but that increases power consumption. And 1 ms is still pretty imprecise. Windows 8 had some improvements, but timer still has jitter somewhere from the requested value up to next system tick. Same of course applies to user mode, of course there's even more jitter.