PC Games w/ 5.1/7.1 audio

[guidinggod]

Do most/all/any newer pc games come with dts/dd audio 5.1/7.1 built in?

I have been absent from the pc gaming scene for a while and I was wondering if I got games like, say, FIFA 15 etc to play on my HTPC setup (via AV Receiver > TV), is the surround sound as good as it is on the new consoles like PS4?

I tried looking for game specs for FIFA and CS:GO (the only two games I'm interested in) and couldn't really find this info.

 

[mmntech]

Yeah, pretty much. At least I've yet to find one from a major studio that doesn't.

Modern gaming rigs output/bitstream audio via HDMI so if you've got an AV receiver, you're good to go. I'm still rocking an analogue sound card which does 5.1 gaming just fine.

 

[Subyman]

Almost all games have it. Its baked into most game engines, so devs don't even need to do much to get it going.

 

[BrightCandle]

Its actually right there in directs sound. Whenever you play a sound you give it a location, directx then processes that based on your output sound setup, so for 5.1 you will have it played out from the appropriate speakers. Its been this way since vista and I can not think of a single game in the last decade that wasn't surround capable.

 

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[motsm]

Why games used to ship with the DD logo on their boxes is still a mystery to me. I guess it was probably just some kind of marketing decision. It's not like UT2004, for example, could actually generate a DD bitstream from within the game engine.

Actually, the old Unreal engine (among others I'm sure) did encode into a form of Dolby surround, I believe Pro Logic. From what I recall, phase was used to encode multichannel audio within a stereo signal, the decoder would then know which discrete channel to assign each sound based on that phase information. I believe my receiver can decode Pro-Logic, but I can't say I've ever cared to try it.

 

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[motsm]

"Old" Unreal Engine meaning what? UE1? Because I'm damned near certain that there was no ProLogic in UT2004, I remember spending hours with a proLogic receiver trying to test for it.

I'm not sure about UE1, I don't think I ever tried to get any type of surround out of that one. All I know about that is that the original UT's (and Unreal's?) music tracks are actually mixed for surround (well, quadraphonic), which is cool if you go to the trouble of converting them to a multi-channel file, but as I understand it the games only ever played them in stereo.

It was Unreal 1.X engine, UT99, Rune, and Deus Ex if I remember correctly. I hadn't heard that the music in UT was 4 channels, but I would assume it worked with Pro Logic enabled. I'd be tempted to give it a shot if I wasn't using analog out from my soundcard.

 

[BrightCandle]

The games pre Vista are going to be quite a bit different, surround sound was a lot less common. But its been basically a solved problem for a decade, well its been consistently stuck for a decade anyway.

 

[guidinggod]

Guys, so if I'm understanding this correctly, most games on PC do not have dts/dd branded multichannel sound like on a console? But they do have multichannel audio which will play fine from my home theatre speakers via my AVR, yea?

My setup is thus: HTPC via hdmi to AVR to 5.1 speakers - video is decoded by the pc but sound is bitstreamed untouched to the AVR which decodes it and sends it onto the speakers...what I want to confirm is if the same thing will happen with games, or will I just get stereo sound?

 

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[guidinggod]

Whether or not you can get a multichannel digital signal from your PC to your receiver depends on the hardware/drivers. If you're using HDMI from a GPU, then that shouldn't be a problem. It will pass along multichannel audio (I think it will send a multichannel LPCM stream, as opposed to DD/DTS).

Now whether or not there is any multichannel content to pass along in the first place is down to the individual game. As has been already stated, most modern games should be OK, but you'll likely have difficulty with older games.

Ah, thanks for the explanation. Got it now. Well, here's hoping both FIFA 2015 and CS:GO don't disappoint me.

 

[alcoholbob]

Console games have way more space for audio than PC games. Consoles have already moved toward 50+GB standard on blu ray whereas PC games still have to fit on a 8GB DVD. So they get DD/DTS whereas we get some crap compressed 112kbps audio on many cases.

 

[BrightCandle]

Console games have way more space for audio than PC games. Consoles have already moved toward 50+GB standard on blu ray whereas PC games still have to fit on a 8GB DVD. So they get DD/DTS whereas we get some crap compressed 112kbps audio on many cases.

Plenty of games are much bigger than 8gb. Seeing as how PC has all but moved to digital distribution or using 3-4 DVDs they basically the same size. I suspect games like star citizen might pass 100GB or more.

 

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[motsm]

I don't think so. I remember this discussion happening on the Beyond Unreal forums years ago, and the upshot was that the game couldn't play the tracks in quad - untapped potential.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/16emhn48ssmsueg/ForegoneQuad.flac

Wonder what kept them from implementing it? The game has Dolby Pro Logic, A3D, and EAX, so it's not lacking options; oh well, thanks for the link.