Blurring Hardware for Modern PCs
Announced in July 2018 along with the free version of Teams, users can blur the background of video calls. The feature is now generally available. However, the technology to perform face recognition to identify the person and understand where the background to be blurred begins and ends only runs on reasonably recent PC equipped with Advanced Vector Extension 2 (AVX2) graphics. AVX2 is what Teams uses to blur the background after it figures out where the user is.
AVX2 is supported by PCs that have a post-Haswell chipset. Blurring works on my Surface Book 2, but doesn’t on my HP Envy 17 of 2014 vintage. Be aware that the CPU has some processing to do to locate a face and blur the background, so it can impact other work on the PC if you run a loaded system.
Background blur is supported in the Teams desktop client for Windows and Mac, but not in the Linux or browser clients.
For more information about the hardware requirements for blurring, see the note in hardware requirements for Microsoft Teams. More detailed information for Windows PC is in hardware decoder and encoder driver recommendations.
The optional Blur my background video effect requires a processor with Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) support. See Hardware decoder and encoder driver recommendations for a list of unsupported decoders and encoders.
My VM users do not have the option to blur their background in Microsoft Teams is there any way to get this to work? somewhere in the VM setting? View settings?
