Security News > 2022 > February > Microsoft Teams now needs 50% less power during meetings

Microsoft has drastically reduced Microsoft Teams' power requirements in calls and meetings since June 2020, improving experience consistency and making it more friendly with low-end devices.

Robert Aichner, a Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft, said today that Microsoft Teams now uses up to 50% less power during energy-intensive scenarios like meetings between more than 10 participants where all of them have video toggled on.

"During our evaluation of the video capture process, we focused on camera optimization to reduce demands on the CPU when using video in meetings, improving configurations, reducing code complexity for auto-exposure, auto-white balance, auto-aliasing, resulting in power draw reduction from the onboard camera and stability enhancements, and face detection processes," Aichner explained.

"Then, we turned to video rendering, particularly for meetings with many participants, where the users receive a video stream for each participant displayed in the Teams client. Incoming videos can have different resolutions that require the client to rescale each."

Microsoft significantly reduced video rendering power requirements by combining the streams resulting from separate video rendering operations for each cell in a meeting's video grid and composing all of them into a single video.

Redmond has also focused its power consumption optimization efforts on making it possible for Teams to tap the dedicated graphic processing unit resources to further improve video rendering performance.

News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-teams-now-needs-50-percent-less-power-during-meetings/