Blur Background on Mac OS

StevenC365 

The fact that Zoom and other similar products easily do background processing on AVX1 processors shows that AVX2 is not required....it's just a decision that the Teams development group have made to not have to code to two versions of the AVX CPU instruction set extensions.  AVX2 introduced 256 bit integers and added FMA (more efficient floating-point operations), so I'm sure that made it somewhat easier to code some of the operations, but it's absolutely not a technical requirement...it's a decision to orphan somewhat older processors that are still extremely capable for background processing.

The proof is in the pudding:  Zoom flawlessly runs background (video-based, even) processing on the same CPU that Teams refuses to do background processing at all (even where they used to do blurring), with no major stress on the processor.  Zoom does have a reasonable cutoff:  there are combinations of older processors and GPUs where Zoom won't do background processing, but it's a far more appropriate cutoff that doesn't unnecessarily exclude very capable CPUs.

So please don't frame this decision as one that was necessitated by the March of Progress or super creaky old CPUs or something...this is just about the Teams development group not wanting to write additional code to support a previous and marginally older but still extremely capable version of the AVX CPU instruction extensions.