X-Fi and Surround question

Sinster

Sinster

Gawd
2FA
Joined
Aug 2, 2002
Messages
703
I'm running Z-5500 via Optic through my X-Fi I/O Drive. With GRAW2 being in Dolby Digital will the output only be still 2.1 because of my X-Fi?
 
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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