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What does it mean when a PC gaem claims to support Dolby Digital?

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imported_thomase

Member
I've heard that FarCry (maybe other games as well) make an explicit claim to support Dolby Digital. From what I understand Dolby Digital is simply a standard for compressed multi-channel audio. ALL games today support multi-channel audio. What does using your Soundstorm to compress the mult-channel audio into AC3 format have to do with the game itself? It seems that according to this logic, all games can claim to support Dolby Digital (only when using Soundstorm of course). However, people seem to think that FarCry is somehow special in this regard. Am I missing something here?
 
Although ALL games may support multi-channel audio, it's not true DD. Infact, very few computers even are DD capable. Just because you have multi-channel audio doesn't mean it's true DD or DD-EX or THX or any other number of different formats. The crappy Dolby Surround is multi-channel, but it's sound isn't discrete.

Oh, and a search would have helped:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...7&threadid=1457747
 
You misunderstood my question.

It seems to me that it is meaningless for a game to claim to support Dolby Digital. ALL modern games output multi-channel audio. Dolby Digital is simply a compression scheme for multi-channel audio that was developed because films and or DVDs don't have enough data capacity to hold all of the audio streams for a movie in uncompressed form. Compressed or uncompressed audio has nothing to do with the game. Thus, since ANY modern game can claim to support Dolby Digital (by sending DirectSound3D to 5.1 channels and then encoding it through Soundstorm), why does FarCry make the claim while others don't? The only thing I can think of is that perhaps all of FarCry's sound output falls under the 17KHz level. If you don't already know, XBOX and Soundstorm real-time DD compression cuts off frequencies above 17KHz. I suppose you could argue that if a game outputs any sound (screams, squeals, beeps, etc.) above that frequency, it will be cut off by the DD encoding and it technically won't sound as orignially intended. Nevermind the fact that neither is the compression totally lossless for frequencies below 17KHz, its just hard to notice the loss in quality.

Saying "PC game X supports Dolby Digital!" is like saying "Music stored on CD Y can be converted to MP3!".
 
Maybe it's like movies are where it has already encoded sounds to Dolby Digital instead of having something like Soundstorm do them. That would mean you could hook it up to a receiver through an optical cable or a digital coax and still get DD 5.1 as opposed to stereo sound that you would get from most games.

That's just a guess though, so it's probably wrong.
 
Originally posted by: thomase
I've heard that FarCry (maybe other games as well) make an explicit claim to support Dolby Digital. From what I understand Dolby Digital is simply a standard for compressed multi-channel audio. ALL games today support multi-channel audio. What does using your Soundstorm to compress the mult-channel audio into AC3 format have to do with the game itself? It seems that according to this logic, all games can claim to support Dolby Digital (only when using Soundstorm of course). However, people seem to think that FarCry is somehow special in this regard. Am I missing something here?
Click to expand...
No, you're correct. All of the PC games that advertise DD on their box (other than odd game that uses DD for in-game movies) can only do so with Soundstorm. So it's really fake advertising in order to take advantage of DD's image as high quality surround audio. I believe UT2003 did the same thing.
 
Thats what I thought.... "fake advertising". However, FarCry does have separate settings for "Surround" and "Dolby Digital 5.1". What the hell is the difference between the two? Could it possibly be the case that there is no difference and it just there to perpetuate the lie that Dolby Digital is some special technlogiy that sounds better than "normal" 5.1 (which is ironically, the exact opposite of the truth, esp. considering the 17KHz cutoff). I find that hard to believe. More believable, but also more sad, is the possibility that they have somehow disabled normal uncompressed 5.1 via DirectSound3D as part of some marketing agreement with Dolby and/or Nvidia in order to force people to buy Soundstorm and/or an HT receiver.
 
So can anyone tell me the difference between the "Surround" and "DD 5.1" settings in FarCry? Does "DD 5.1" just do normal 5.1 output to your speakers unless you enable SPDIF out and DD encoding via Soundstorm, in which case you can technically call it DD?
 
No, i understood the question... just because a game offers multi-channel sound, doesn't mean that it's all equal. Some are better than others. But yes, DD on a PC game is pretty much just marketting, because few computers have Soundstorm. You'll see DD in Xbox games more often, because there were more people with capable systems in their HTs.
 
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