Video calls or streaming heat the CPU while the GPU is idle
Without a hardware codec, encoding falls back to CPU. On laptops with iGPU that is wasteful, since H.264 and H.265 acceleration is usually present.
support/performance/video-codec-acceleration-miststeps: 4
Try this first
- Open chrome://media-internals during video and look for Decoder Name
- If it shows software decoder: update GPU drivers and check codec pack
- For Teams and Zoom: enable hardware acceleration in app settings
- Verify with dxdiag that media features are available
When to bring us in
If the software path persists: install Intel Media SDK or AMD Media Foundation drivers manually.
See also
- My laptop is suddenly slowThree main suspects: a runaway background process, near-full disk, or a Windows update in progress.
- One specific application is slow for everyoneIf an app is slow for one person: local. For everyone at once: server side or vendor side.
- Opening files from the file server takes minutesOften the server itself is fine and the issue is network routing or stalling DNS resolution.
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