PC game Digital Surround via Prelude digital output?

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spaceman

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Title says it all.

Does the Prelude, for PC games, do 5.1/7.1 via its digital output?

In another thread, Nicholaski was trying to tell me that with the Prelude you can get digital surround output. I was under the impression that for PC games, which have to be encoded on the fly b/c you are moving around, that surround was only possible via analogue?
 
Dolby Digital Live is probably what you're looking for if you're planning to hook it up to a receiver.
 
Thank you 450.

Now, does this work for vista too? Or is it only XP atm?

Is it just the Prelude or does the X-FI titanium do it too?

thanks for the help.
 
I don't know about the OS compatibilities. From my reading it seems like XP has better support than Vista at this point.

Prelude and X-Fi Ti both have DDL capacities from what I've seen but from forum posts here and otherwise there is a mixed consensus. For some people it works great, other encounter noticable lag.

When I had the Turtle Beach DDL I had no problems. But then again, I wasn't processing very intensive sounds. Mainly older PC games.
 
I was concerned about latency. This should be no surprise though. I doubt that in high speed games like COD4 that the sound card could keep up. Maybe in another year or two. Probably not until the next OS though.
 
I think you should be fine right now. (educated guess)

When DDL first came out in 06, most people didn't have CPU's like C2D's. Perhaps with a modern dual or quad core CPU the processing issue will be null.
 
Prelude has DDL in vista and XP, and DTS in vista. 5.1 sound with DDL, I believe DTS can do 7.1, works with all sounds regardless of source.
 
The Prelude will convert any 5.1 source from your PC to 5.1 Dolby Digital (vista or xp) or 5.1 DTS (vista only), including games.
 
Moofasa~ said:
The Prelude will convert any 5.1 source from your PC to 5.1 Dolby Digital (vista or xp) or 5.1 DTS (vista only), including games.
Click to expand...

Yeah but does it do it well or is there latency in games? Lip sync in movies? etc
 
spaceman said:
Yeah but does it do it well or is there latency in games? Lip sync in movies? etc
Click to expand...

There will always be some delay since digital audio is packetized, so the converter has to store up a certain amount of data to convert before sending, generally just a few msec worth but still a non-zero amount. Then it has to convert it, not sure if it uses CPU or X-Fi chip for conversion but either way it should be pleanty fast. So there WILL be a bit of latency, how much you notice it is more of a personal factor, some people do, some people don't
 
My understanding is that the average latency out of the Windows mixer is about 30ms (XP or Vista). Although Dolby doesn't publish any specs for DDL (figures), I'd guess it's somewhere along the line of 50ms. Effectively, you're looking at no longer than 100ms, which is perfectly fine. You may be able to notice the delay if you look for it, but it isn't going to be a deal-breaker.
 
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