Identify number of sound channel a game output ?

[karnalta]

Hello all,

Id there a way (except with manual testing of course) to identify the real number of sound channel a game output ?

For example :
- iRacing XAudio natively output surround channels, so you can directly output analog signal from the sound card and avoid loss.
- Assetto Corsa (the first one) only output stereo, so you have to enable DDL/DTS on the sound card to "upsample" the sound and output via SPDIF/Coax.

I am but confused and I'd like to know if I can identify this via a third party software or so ?

 

[BrightCandle]

Its actually quite difficult. There have in the past been some guides to the various sound middle ware and what they were capable of and then lists of games and which middleware they used but as sound and the various techniques for surround sound have fallen out of favor so has the data fallen to disrepair.

I have a Sennheiser GSX 1000 and it presents a 7.1 interface to Windows but then uses its own algorithm to produce surround sound in the headphones from those channels. One advantage to that is if I run a program like OBS I get a VU meter per channel and I can see what sound is being produced through which channels, so I can confirm if a game is 2.0/2.1/5.1/7.1 although not whether its applying surround sound filtering already to the output. Most realtek sound cards on motherboards can also present 5.1 for their headphone modes and you could use such a technique to at least work out from a Windows perspective if its output channels. By and large games nowadays auto select based on the capabilities of the sound device set as the current sound device in the Windows control panel sound section where you can also adjust the channels. The vast majority of games will use 5.1/7.1 but which middleware is a bit of a deeper and harder question.