Microsoft said that between June 2020 and December 2021, it was able to halve the power consumption of Teams.
The lead manager for Microsoft Teams said in a blog post that the video service now consumes up to 50% less power during various resource-intensive scenarios, such as meetings between more than 10 participants, when they all turn on cameras and communicate via video.
The company explained that it does this to ensure that Teams is convenient to use on low-cost user devices, as well as on laptops that are not connected to power. In fact, Teams now consumes far less CPU and GPU resources than before by isolating and optimizing power-intensive processes such as capturing and displaying content, transferring it, encoding, and rendering.
Optimization graph for various energy-intensive Microsoft Teams processes.
Stages of finalization of Microsoft Teams:
October 2020: Capture and video hardware and optimization (by reducing CPU usage when using video cameras);
February 2021: Combining multiple screen elements into a single renderer (improvements in handling multiple video streams in a conference call);
June 2021: Direct video rendering (render video directly on screen instead of web layer);
Nov 2021: GPU Rendering Optimization (Improved video card usage for video rendering);
December 2021: Improvements in mode preview rendering (improved rendering of video previews during video calls).
Microsoft clarified that while adding enhancements to the source code, the Teams developers focused on optimizing the camera to reduce CPU usage when using video in meetings, improving configurations, reducing code complexity for auto exposure, auto white balance, auto anti-aliasing. These improvements and solutions have reduced the power consumption of the built-in camera and improved stability. The optimization also affected the reduction in the cost of computing resources during running face recognition processes.
Microsoft disclosed that developers had to redesign the video processing and rendering algorithm, especially for meetings with a large number of participants, when users receive a video stream for each participant displayed in the Teams client. Incoming videos can have different resolutions, which requires the client software to rescale each of them during the meeting in order to display correctly to the user.
As a result, Microsoft was able to significantly reduce video rendering overhead by combining the streams resulting from individual video renders for each item in the meeting's video grid and composing them into a single video stream.
Microsoft said that it will continue to refine Teams. The company will focus on not only optimizing power consumption, but also on less expensive use of GPU resources to improve video rendering performance. Microsoft is working on this issue with developers and vendors of CPUs and GPUs, as well as their combined solutions on a single chip for laptops and PCs.
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