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Comment by nallic | Hacker News Reader

I have a 5.1 surround system (with real speakers around me) and I find the lack of surround support in games sad. How come not any game supports output to a surround system - they have their sound sources in a 3D environment and should be able to mix a sound output with arbtrary speaker setup ?

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Like the other comments I'm confused, pretty much any game I've played for the past few years supports surround sound, most of them 7.1 even.

What I don't understand is why Dolby Atmos is not used much more for games. Xbox One and PC support it but only very few titles use it. PS4 and PS5 don't support it all for games (only for video content), despite all Sony's bragging about their dedication to PS5 audio. Dolby Atmos seems perfect for games, for developers because it effortlessly maps audio directly to any 3D position in space, and for users because it scales all the way from headphones to soundbars to full 7.4.2 setups.

I was royally pissed off to learn PS5 would not natively support Dolby Atmos, I have a full 7.4.1 home-theater setup with height speakers and movies and Dolby Atmos demo's sound absolutely awesome. Yet if I play games the best I can get is 7.1 which is nice, but the height speakers go totally unused. It's probably related to licensing costs, but it is extremely disappointing having waited for the PS5 for so long and not seeing any kind of upgrade to the audio.

I suspect it's due to cost and licensing to use that particular brand and technology.

It shouldn't even be necessary. If you look at the DirectSound channel listing from ages and ages ago, I think even in Windows XP, there are height channels listed. But I've never seen a sound card that used them or let you select any higher than 7.1 in the Sound control panel.

Sure, but why does the Xbox One support it then, but not the PS5? And wouldn't it be possible to somehow incorporate the licensing cost in the console by means of a paid software upgrade (like on Windows) or a 'premium' version of the console that has it by default?

As far as I know Dolby Atmos can be seamlessly mapped onto to 5.1 or 7.1, so from the developer perspective there should be no effort/cost to provide Dolby Atmos audio. I might be wrong about this but I assume the licensing cost would be for the playback device and not for the 'right' to bundle an Atmos audio track with your game?

Sure if you watch movies in EN you are on the lucky side when it comes to support of high audio bitrate atmos++ support. Once you watch localized movies you are out of content quickly. Why pay a licensing fee (dolby) for your games when the niche is high. Its like the same with supporting Linux for games. I had some hopes for that because Stadia requires Linux ports. But I also expected Stadia to fail on a large scale.

Many (most?) PC games support surround sound. (Re another comment: Fortnite supposedly supports both 5.1 and 7.1. I have not tried it.)

But primarily via the analog audio outputs on the back of a PC motherboard.

If you've hooked your PC into your surround sound setup via HDMI, optical cable, or other single connection method, it is unlikely to work.

If your surround sound amp supports per-channel analog in and your PC has 5.1 or 7.1 out support, you can use 4 or 6 (5.1 / 7.1) 1/8" stereo to RCA cables to connect your PC to your surround sound system. Depending on your TV / surround sound system, you may need to mess with delay settings to get the audio to sync with the video. Having your TV and surround sound system set to "game mode" may help. Hooking your PC output directly to the TV may also help.

My understanding is using DTS, Dolby Atmos, etc to encode / decode surround sound requires paying licensing fees. These aren't paid by Microsoft as a part of Windows, by the gaming framework companies for their Windows games, etc.

I suspect Microsoft and Sony handle the fees for their consoles, but I do not know for certain. It's possible they require game makers to pay them.

Edited for clarity.

I use HDMI with 7.1 PCM for audio from my gaming PC. It requires setting up an A/V receiver as a second monitor, which is kind of annoying, but it can be a "clone" of the primary gaming monitor. I do get immersive 2D surround sound from games.

per other comments: It seems I am wrong on the support of 7.1 sound on PC games. I have to look into it again and see why it does not enable or show up in my game settings menu's

What do you mean? I've yet to play any AA or AAA game without support. Games like RDR2 or The Last of Us 2 allow you to configure your audio output to a high degree.

What games have you been playing and on what platform? I remember being amazed how well surround sound worked in Left 4 Dead 2 on PC back in 2010.

ex. Fortnite don't seem to support it (but it does support some binaureal sound). When I got the system I ran through a couple of games on my steam Library to try it out and found very few supported it. Most vere based on the big engines (Unity / Unreal) and I kind of just suspected it to be a compile time swith on the devs side, but maybe im wrong - are sounds mixed in a studio and not on a "per source" kind of way ? - maybe they are not really attached to a position.

It depends on the engine and how you set it up. But the big engines all support attaching sounds to positions and mixing is done in real-time.

I remember a lot of effort went into making sounds feel right in the NFS games. Including mixing engine sounds recorded from different parts of the car to match the camera's position relative to the car. We even had an article about the process of recording those sounds:

http://www.speedhunters.com/2015/10/recording-the-sounds-of-...

Speaking to the sound engineers was one of those wonderful glimpses into a whole other field that I love about working in games.

A quick Google search gives me this: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_that_support...

I can verify that at least parts of this list is correct. I remember getting jump scares when hearing monsters behind me in Dead Space 2, F.E.A.R., and as I mentioned earlier Left 4 Dead 2.

One thing I will say is that settings screens usually do a poor job at showing whether they're using surround sound. Games often just query the system for audio setup and show little more than whether you've selected headphones or speakers.

edit: since I thought it strange that your experience was so different from mine and that Fortnite wouldn't support it, I googled it and found an article from 2019 about how Fortnite, originally built for 5.1 surround sinds sound, now supports 7.1. My guess is there's some configuration issue with your PC.

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