Forum Discussion
Solved
Blur Background on Mac OS
I am using a Macbook Pro to work remotely. The blur background feature is helpful, but it appears to be absent in Teams for Mac. I noticed the blur feature support page says it's not available on L...
Both of my macs reported in "machdep.cpu.features" only AVX1.0. I executed this command
sysctl - a | grep avx
On one mac (blur disabled) I got
hw.optional.avx1_0: 1
hw.optional.avx2_0: 0On another mac (blur enabled) I got
hw.optional.avx1_0: 1
hw.optional.avx2_0: 1
As Grandswiss noted, the command sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu.features is not sufficient to check a given Mac's ability to support AVX 2.0. That command returns only "AVX1.0", even if the CPU supports AVX 2.0. You must use sysctl - a | grep avx and look at the hw.optional.avx2_0 line to see if it's supported or not.
The question is why AVX 2.0 is even needed...Zoom and many other developers do this on a wide range of machines without limiting it to newer processors, and MS previously support Background Blur on these AVX 1.0 machines (like previous-generation Mac Pros). Smells like lazy developers.....
At the very least, MS should still support Background Blur on AVX 1.0 machines, and leave the fancier background images to AVX 2.0, even though I don't see that as necessary.
I'm hoping that MS did this to quickly get their fancier background processing out the door to better compete with Zoom, and that they'll eventually add AVX 1.0 machines back into the mix in a subsequent version as they get more time.
