[davecom]

Usually I use a thread and have it sleep for a certain amount of time. But what if I just used a timer? Would the latency sometimes be too great?

[GRAHAMUK]

Yes, this would work pretty well I reckon. However, one piece of advice from experience - don't assume that equal time == equal distance when moving a sprite. Instead you should measure the actual time interval and move the sprite according to its velocity - that way you'll not get weird effects when things get faster or (more likely) slower - the frame rate may get hit but the game dynamics won't.