Forum Discussion
Camera Freezing - possibly after an update.
OK everyone, got some updates for you all after multiple conversations with Microsoft!
The most important news is that Microsoft believes they finally identified the issue, and did a rollback for a particular setting (details below) on the evening of Wednesday, April 26th. I know we received an email about the change; not sure if any of you also received this. The change was rolled back to ALL AMD machines for all tenants under Microsoft (not rolled out to any computers using Intel/Nvidia graphics). Hopefully everyone here is no longer seeing the issue; curious to hear feedback from others!
For anyone (probably most of you) that are interested, here are the details we gathered in a call we were able to get, directly with some of the main Teams engineers at Microsoft.
Essentially, there are 2 different paths that video can take:
1. Modern API. This uses Media Foundation. It allows the camera to utilize GPU memory in order to provide better battery life and performance
2. Legacy: This uses Direct Show. Camera is almost entirely handled via CPU/RAM memory. This method isn't "deprecated" yet, but is considered "legacy". It has very little dependency on drivers.
Teams has been utilizing the Modern API, however recently it was discovered that AMD GPU's can glitch out when getting close to "max utilization" and crash the graphics, causing Teams/camera issues. On the 26th, Microsoft performed a code change that essentially forced all AMD clients to utilize the Legacy method for camera processing, to avoid the GPU crashing issues that were causing the problem. They are also researching a different fix that is more modern that would be long term, and hopefully rolled out in the next couple months. The newer fix should also be able to account for a few anomalies that evidently can still occur on the Legacy method (apparently specifically with certain makes/models of physical capture cards).
Hopefully that all makes at least partial sense...this issue was evidently initially recognized on the AMD-based Surface devices a few weeks ago, but the Microsoft engineers stated that they weren't able to draw the connection to other AMD-based devices until last week as we were providing them logs to look into.
Hope Teams is working better for everyone now!
- The rollback is on Teams or Windows?
Which version should we have to be ok?
Thx!! 🙂AlexMM-QC The "rollback" was a server-side change, not a Teams client or Windows change. You wouldn't see a version number difference anywhere, but they changed the way video processed on AMD clients from a server-side modification.
oheimala you seem to have a different issue, as you're using an Intel-based processor. Your camera issues could be due to other driver incompatibilities, but the primary issue here has been determined to be AMD exclusive. Have you completely uninstalled and reinstalled Teams to make sure your installation doesn't have an issue? I'd also recommend getting on the Teams 2.0 beta client and test to see if that makes a difference; the underlying engine has completely changed, so that could also help!
If you want to try out the new Teams experience (Teams 2.0), make sure you're in the preview program (click the 3 dots at the upper right, select About --> Public Preview), then if your admin has configured the settings properly, you'll see a toggle in the upper left to join the new Teams experience.
- Great Info Mike! I did open a case and didn't even get a response, so it's good someone got a hold of Microsoft and could get some quality first hand information, so at least we have some sort of a RCA.
I can confirm I have been using legacy Teams after James comment, without any video issues.
