What's the state of positional/3D audio (via headphones) on Windows?

WildW_UK · February 13, 2021

I recently got back into playing first-person shooters (or rather I've been playing a lot of Deep Rock Galactic) and I'm wondering what the current position is on good 3D positional sound. There are some enemies in the game that move around quickly and listening to them should be the best way to know where they are - but it feels like it's not working as well as it should.

Many years ago I used to play Battlefield 2 and I remember being super-impressed when I upgraded to a Creative X-FI sound card, which had some CMSS-3D special sauce that did really good 3D audio with basic 2-channel headphones. Suddenly I could hear exactly where enemies were around me, it felt like such an advantage.

These days I assume that proprietary sound stuff like this is long gone, and maybe decent 3D audio is just built into Windows? A quick Google search revealed that indeed, Windows 10 contains "Windows Sonic" spatial audio, which I eagerly turned on and wondered why everything suddenly sounded like it was in a bathroom far far away. I've tried playing with it turned on, and I think I noticed some interesting positional stuff going on, but it still sounds weird and quiet. The X-FI card just sounded crystal clear and amazing when I first used it back in 2006 or so.

Nobody seems to talk much about sound in games these days, I wonder if it's a solved problem or just nobody is interested. Is there anything else out there that actually delivers a better experience than motherboard audio or USB headsets?

Ahoy Hoy · February 13, 2021

Very little is to do with motherboard soundcards operating system etc. Its all to do with the game or movie player.
Plug the headphones in and set them to stereo set the game to stereo headphones and uninstall those dumb software and remove the useless surround sound headphone sound cards.

rice guru · February 13, 2021

While I don't use it much it can be pretty cool if well implemented. Usually VSS when added to a game via hardware like a headset that has a 7.1 surround sound button kinda sucks and has fucked me up in video games before. But when the game engine natively has it or has support by dolby surround sound for headphones like call of duty it's generally pretty cool.

The Flying Sloth · February 13, 2021

Binaural stereo (virtual surround) is in a great place but as mentioned previously it has nothing to do with your hardware and everything to do with the software implemented by the developers.

The Flying Sloth · February 13, 2021

Just went and copied this from some of my previous answers,

"We tend to not recommend 'true' 7.1 headsets here because in real life humans only hear in stereo, two ears creating a binaural 3D image using the minuscule delay between ears (due to the speed of sound) and spectral pinnae cues to localise the audio. The much smaller, multiple, drivers in true surround headphones are each less accurate than the two single drivers in stereo headphones while driving up cost for no benefit in applications with binaural stereo (and given Windows sonic can turn any 7.1 source into binaural audio, many applications don't even need that)."

In short 'virtual surround' is actually more true to life (at least as far as headphones go) than 'true' surround sound. You can use audiophile headphones to hear virtual surround sound.

In the end it comes down to software implementation, if a developer has used a game engine with binaural audio or not and whether or not they're expecting windows sonic to do the conversion from 7.1 for you because windows sonic isn't exactly perfect....