Microsoft Teams now uses up to 50% less power during meetings and calls

What you need to know

• Microsoft greatly reduced the energy used by Teams during calls and meetings.
• CPU and memory optimization allowed Microsoft to reduce the energy used in Teams by up to 50%.
• The amount of energy required to power a Teams call or meeting varies greatly depending on a person's hardware setup and what's being done on screen.

Teams meetings and calls now use significantly less power than before, thanks to optimizations by Microsoft. Certain aspects of Teams meetings and calls draw quite a bit of power from a PC, such as sharing a screen or streaming a video. Microsoft managed to reduce the power draw of these experiences by optimizing how Teams handles cameras. The end result is that Teams now uses up to 50% less power during calls and meetings.

The amount of power that a meeting requires varies depending on how many people are in a call, what content is being shared and processed, and which devices people are using. For example, video calls are more resource-intensive than audio calls. In a recent Tech Community post, Microsoft explains its efforts to optimize how Teams uses cameras.

Previously, a Teams meeting with a 3x3 grid of participants required nine separate rendering operations. Teams now combines feeds into a single video, lowering the power requirements for every device connected to the call.

Microsoft also optimized how Teams deals with auto-exposure, auto-white balance, and auto-aliasing.

Several optimizations for teams have already rolled out, and Microsoft has more on the way in 2022, though the company didn't share any specifics about future plans.