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Ask HN: Why do electron video calling apps use so much CPU on Mac?
I noticed (that's the very easy part) that all the electron apps (like Slack or MS Teams) take 60-80 % of CPU on my i5 2017 Macbook Pro 13" during video calls. The CPU runs on a high frequency (2.5+ Ghz) during the call.
I always thought that this is normal, but recently I tried a same call on the dual booting Macbook 12 2017 (significantly weaker machine with a same generation CPU) under Windows 10, and same MS Teams call didn't even raise the CPU from a default 1.1 Ghz speed, and took about 30 %.
My hypothesis is that on mac, Electron video meeting apps don't use the video (h265) acceleration on CPU or GPU, and instead take the slow non-accelerated path, while it works in an accelerated way under Windows 10.
Is this correct? Is there a Chromium patch that is looking into this?