In energy-intensive scenarios with multiple video participants, Microsoft Teams has made quite a few optimizations.
Since June 2020, Microsoft has regularly tinkered with the power requirements of video calls to ensure a pleasant experience for any type of PC. Added benefit: lower battery consumption when working on a laptop without an outlet nearby.
The improvements are mainly in optimizing energy-intensive processes such as content ingestion, encoding and rendering.
Robert Aichner, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft, clarified, “During our evaluation of the video capture process, we focused on camera optimization to reduce CPU load in video meetings. We reduced code complexity for auto-exposure, auto-white balance and auto-aliasing, resulting in improved stability in addition to energy gains.”
At the end of 2021, Microsoft Teams made a lot of video rendering optimizations to put less strain on the graphics card. To that end, it is working with CPU and GPU chipset makers to further optimize current and future chips for video calls within Teams.
Timeline of all optimizations
As of June 2020, Microsoft has been working on optimizations to make Teams less heavy on PCs. These are all achievements so far to achieve a total energy gain of 50 percent.
- October 2020: hardware and video recording and optimization (by reducing CPU loads when the video camera is active)
- Feb. 2021: consolidate multiple screen elements for a single rendering process (improvement in processing multiple video streams in videocalls)
- June 2021: Direct video renderer (renders video directly to the screen instead of a weblayer)
- November 2021: render optimization via GPU (improvements in the use of the graphics card for video rendering)
- December 2021: preview render improvements (optimization of video preview rendering in videocalls)
Microsoft Teams, meanwhile, continues to evolve at breakneck speed. Since the beginning of this year, you can chat between personal and business accounts and the platform finally supports end-to-end encryption. For SMEs, there is now also Microsoft Teams Essentials as a standalone solution. Microsoft shared earlier this year that the platform has 270 million monthly active users, an increase of 20 million compared to the summer of 2021.