Video calls and screen share make Teams and Windows 10 unusable

Brass Contributor

I represent an enterprise organisation that uses Surface Pro hardware and the full 365 suite across 22 employees in the UK.

 

We have been using Teams for almost 3 years now, but in the last month the performance has degraded and is making the system unusable.  We, as many organisation rely on Teams video calls and screen share for collaboration (more so now, then ever before).  However when the video is enabled on a call, the performance of the Surface Pro's drops.  There is huge lag and stuttering on the machine, meaning you cannot multi-task and the video quality begins to degrade as well.

 

We have a variety of surface pro's in use, ranging from the Surface Pro 5th generation, through to the very latest Surface Pro 7th generation.  All machines have the latest Windows 10 build and Teams versions.

 

I have been checking system performance on a few calls, and I cannot work it out.  The CPU performance is quite low, likewise the GPU isn't operating at maximum either.

 

This requires an urgent fix. 

51 Replies

@24Plimlico  I totally agree. We use surface Pro from 4 to 6 gen and its very slow hen video is enabled and screen sharing is enabled

@Renaud SERIES glad we are not the only ones.


I noticed that one of my colleagues is using windows build 1903, whilst the others are on 1909.  What windows version are your team on?

@Renaud SERIES 

 

We have the same problem , we have an estate of Dell Desktops and Laptops all fully patched etc and all work ok with teams . We have high end users running surface pros 5 - 7's all now are saying that in the last month teams video calls cause the surface pro to grind to a halt.

Surely Microsoft must know about this 

@24Plimlico 

 

Hi 

Have you been able to find a solution to this? 

I have the very same problem but only with Surface pro's our Dell pcs work fine. Its so frustrating 

 

Regards 

Mark 

Hi all,

 

What you describe seems similar to what I'm experiencing in terms of performance.  See my thread: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/video-call-vs-intel-speedstep/td-p/1488514

 

When some of you are saying that CPU usage is low, have you checked what the actual clockspeed of the CPU was at that moment?

@MarkHodgkissNope, nothing, I don't even know who to speak to at Microsoft about this.  We even made light of it on our pitch via Teams to Microsoft for some work and even they said yes its been playing up recently... 

you would hope so, but its ridiculous, their own hardware is failing.

@24Plimlico, we are using Lenovo laptops and Microsoft Surface Pros in our company.

The Lenovo users don't have these problems, but the Surface users do.
I have the same issue: when in a video conference, it's nearly impossible to show something on a website (very slow waiting times) 

@ErikBru @24Plimlico @DDSC1 

 

This issue was recently reported in our Uservoice feedback forum.  It would be great if you voted for it because the more votes something gets, the greater the priority Microsoft tries to give it (you can imagine the number of requests we get for features and fixes and we do our best to focus our resources where the customer need is greatest).  https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/908686-bug-reports/suggestions/40736056-microsoft-surfac...

 

I will also reach out to our internal Teams engineering team and see if I can get a more immediate solution for you.  I will post back here once I do.  EDITED 7/23/2020:  Please see the post by Emily Kirby on 7/23/2020 for the Microsoft program manager response.

Exactly the same issue for me as well.

Surface Pro 5th gen, it’s got progressively worse over the last few weeks. I just cannot screen share anymore without it crippling my whole machine.

Updated the surface driver pack, re-installed teams, cleared the teams cache, disabled GPU acceleration, no difference at all.

At first I wondered if it was my internet connection as I’m working from home these days, but it’s not that, I’ve tried it on and older Dell laptop I have, and it’s absolutely fine.

Last resort is to send it back to the Office for a re-build, I’m really out of options now.

@Richie835I wouldn't waste your time re-building it.  I have done that on a few surface pro's over the last month, and makes no difference with the Teams issue. 

@ThereseSolimeno do you have any news for us? Your message happened one month ago and still no answers...

@Dortega-TRD 

No I still have the same problem , only on Surface Pro's . Its dreadful its got to the stage now where we have replaced the surface pro with a Dell 5300 2 - 1 which works perfectly. 

 

 

@ThereseSolimeno Same here: we are slowly replacing Surface Pro with Lenovo here in the company; due to this issue with Teams.

PS: disabling GPU hardware acceleration seems to have helped a bit though. 

Had the same issue on my Surface pro. Was browsing on the internet and saw something about GPU and Surface Pro. Information was shared that the Surface Pro cannot handle the GPU request as GPU isn't sufficient enough. When I disabled GPU usage for Teams, it was performing a lot better, but still not as it should be.

 

I recently upgraded to a Dell 7300 (company policy, my wish was to upgrade to Surface Book 3), and Teams is performing a lot better!

Just to make sure it has something to do with the Teams client, did you tried the Teams Web client?

 

Let me know the outcome on using the web client, and maybe switching off GPU usage is working for you as well :)

 

Kind regards and stay healthy,

Mitchell Bakker

@ThereseSolimeno there are only 12 votes on the user voice thing. yet 800+ views of my post here.  Microsoft need to look in to this, its getting ridiculous. 

@Mitchell Bakker I tried the GPU thing, and didn't make much different in honesty.  I've used the web client a bit too, same problem.

Hi @Mitchell Bakker,

 

Disabling GPU didn't helped at all and the UX in the web client when talking about performance is as worse as with the app.

 

We are now migrating some key users to Zoom to minimize the problem when having calls with external key customers...

 

Regards