Do most PC games these days support multichannel audio?

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Gawd
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Aug 25, 2010
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Like 5.1, 7.1, Atmos, etc.? I remember back in the early 2000s, game audio used to be a pretty big thing with the likes of Sound Blaster Live! sound cards and whatnot. Based on the limited stuff I've read, while PC games these days might support multichannel audio the implementation might not be too great. Any comments on this? It seems there are more people with 2.1 speaker setups and headphones over multichannel audio setups too.

Also, are console games more likely to have multichannel audio support considering they are more likely to be connected to home theaters? I have a PS4 Pro and only play PS4 exclusives on it. All of the 5 games I played on it while connected to a 5.1 home theater had multichannel audio. Not sure how multi-platform games will be.
 
When I still had a 5.1 setup Battlefield 1 did pretty nice with airplanes flying overhead.
 
what is sad is that there are games today that DON'T support any kind of surround sound. (depending on genre of the game)
 
I'd say at least 90% of games do. I have mine hooked up to an AV receiver via the Nvidia HDMI-out. Just set your number of speakers in Windows and the games do the rest.
It doesn't mean they all do a great job with it, but the same can be said for the consoles, too.
Subnautica is the only big/famous game I can think of that is straight-up stereo only. A few games "fake" that they have surround sound (aka. they send a multi-channel signal but only actually use 2 channels), but they do that on the consoles, too. Games from smaller developers tend to do that, which is understandable.
Atmos isn't super commonly used yet, but some really high-profile games use it. Borderlands 3, Jedi Fallen Order, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Gears 4 & 5, Warzone, etc. To get that to work, you have to enable the Atmos option in Windows. Ditto if you want Atmos for Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.
 
Good positional audio died with hardware sound in Vista. Many games still offer software based surround sound but it's not as good to begin with and it doesn't seem like they put as much effort into it as they used to, I'm sure that at least partly has to do with a lot more people using headsets for surround that don't have very good separation anyway.

I also blame Creative for getting MS to kill hardware audio by getting the game industry to adopt EAX as the de facto 3d audio API and then abusing their position with declining hardware features/quality, increased price, and to top it off crappy drivers. My last Creative card was a top of the line SB Live Platinum card($$$) that was so new when I got it that it was hard to find in stock and was completely abandoned just a few months later when they surprise launched the Audigy line, this would have been mostly fine except they never released a properly working set of drivers for my card.
 
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Yes lots of games still have positional audio, in most cases you will have to enable it.

The bigger issue is that many games do not have very good positional audio. Sounds may seem to move around the user, but they may not have depth or distance. Few, if any have decent environmentally altered sound, i.e. a foot step on a concrete road, doesn't sound any different than one in a concrete floor interior space, no reverb/echo etc.
 
Good positional audio died with hardware sound in Vista. Many games still offer software based surround sound but it's not as good to begin with and it doesn't seem like they put as much effort into it as they used to, I'm sure that at least partly has to do with a lot more people using headsets for surround that don't have very good separation anyway.

I also blame Creative for getting MS to kill hardware audio by getting the game industry to adopt EAX as the de facto 3d audio API and then abusing their position with declining hardware features/quality, increased price, and to top it off crappy drivers. My last Creative card was a top of the line SB Live Platinum card($$$) that was so new when I got it that it was hard to find in stock and was completely abandoned just a few months later when they surprise launched the Audigy line, this would have been mostly fine except they never released a properly working set of drivers for my card.
I see people saying stuff like this and you couldn’t be more wrong.

You can use Dolby Atmos or any number of other methods these days and get amazing surround out of any setup you want. I just don’t agree.
 
I see people saying stuff like this and you couldn’t be more wrong.

You can use Dolby Atmos or any number of other methods these days and get amazing surround out of any setup you want. I just don’t agree.
Atmos is better than standard software surround for positional audio but it isn't as good as EAX/Directsound was at that, has a ton more limitations, and doesn't offer environmental effects at all which is important for games. Also the big claim to fame and focus of Atmos from everything I've seen is simulated surround on stereo headphones(which is never going to be as good as true surround).

Atmos is likely as good as you're going to get these days but it looks like there's only about a dozen games that even support it on PC and you need an external receiver that supports Atmos for the best results. I don't see how Atmos is a worthy replacement for EAX and that isn't surprising since 3D positional audio in games was never it's main goal.
 
Atmos is fantastic, but it's tough to be that high on it when so few games use it. The last two Gears games have some of the best audio in gaming history, though. Hopefully more games will start using it.

The thing about positional audio on the PC is that it's no worse than the consoles. With only a couple exceptions, games on the PC sound just like their console brethren. At least assuming you have the same audio setup. A home theater is going to make a set of little Creative Labs sound laughable, so you have to compare apples to apples.

I'm intrigued by the new PS5 audio tech. Even though they didn't have Atmos, Sony's top-tier titles do a damn good job of faking depth, and their sound engineers are the best around. With some real-deal audio tech behind them...it could be amazing. I'm a little curious how end users are going to take advantage of it, though. It it going to send some kind of fake Atmos or DTS:X stream or is it going to be PCM-based or what? What kind of AVR setup will be needed?
 
Ya most do. You find some that don't, indies in particular, but lots do. More games I play than don't support good surround audio. Some are dumb and only support 5.1 and won't do 7.1, but plenty support 7.1.
 
Atmos is better than standard software surround for positional audio but it isn't as good as EAX/Directsound was at that, has a ton more limitations, and doesn't offer environmental effects at all which is important for games. Also the big claim to fame and focus of Atmos from everything I've seen is simulated surround on stereo headphones(which is never going to be as good as true surround).

Atmos is likely as good as you're going to get these days but it looks like there's only about a dozen games that even support it on PC and you need an external receiver that supports Atmos for the best results. I don't see how Atmos is a worthy replacement for EAX and that isn't surprising since 3D positional audio in games was never it's main goal.

I note that there's no reason why EAX couldn't be re-implemented in an audio API that's still HW accelerated, such as OpenAL or even Windows built-in XAudio2.

The real reason HW sound processing died is because CPUs are so powerful in comparison to how much audio processing you need that it's pointless to have dedicated HW just for audio processing effects; you can brute force everything via Software. Thing is, most devs don't bother.

Anyway, multichannel out is easy enough; you already have an omni-dimensional soundscape, so it's just a matter of mapping to speakers.
 
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