It's my understanding that Creative cards don't convert to Dolby Digital on the fly, which is necessary to transmit an interactive game's 5.1 sound as a DD signal (e.g. to your receiver/decoder). Now, if the game converted everything to DD and fed it to the sound card like DVD software sends DD signals to the sound card, then I guess the game would be in DD. However, I've never heard of this. The only DD PC gaming I've heard of is with the nForce boards that have DD encoding abilities, and then really all your getting is standard 5.1 gaming sound encoded by a lossy (i.e. DD) encoding algorithm which may degrade the sound quality. I've never actually heard an nForce DD-encoded game, so this point is just a hypothesis.
DD for games is not really important IF you can run 5.1 analog out. For instance, FEAR produces surround sound (5.1) and I use my Creative Audigy 2 to pump analog signals directly to my receiver. If you only run digital, then you can only run 2 channels/stereo without an encoding algorithm like DD, DTS, etc.
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