video conferencing: Microsoft Teams on laptop will consume 50% less power now, claims tech giant

Microsoft Teams on your laptop will now consume 50% less power during energy-intensive Team meetings with over 10 users, Microsoft claimed in a blogpost.
Microsoft says that it reviewed multiple factors in Teams, which were causing a battery drain on laptops like content capture, encoding and rendering during a video call and then worked on camera optimisation to reduce CPU demand, improve configurations, “reducing code complexity by auto exposure, auto-white balance and auto-aliasing”, which ended up drawing lesser power.
For video rendering, which could involve incoming videos with different resolutions, the tech giant says it combined the streams and composed them into a single video, which helped it consolidate operations in video rendering and “significantly reduce” the power requirements for each device in the meeting.
As per Microsoft, rendering optimisations, targeting individual screen components, will cause the application to use lesser power during video and application sharing. The company has also planned more screen-sharing optimisations in 2022.
“Looking forward, we’ll continue to work closely with CPU and GPU chipset vendors to ensure the next generation of silicon is further optimized for Teams video conferencing,” added Microsoft in the blog post.