surround sound? quick and simple question: does sims 2 feature surround sound? as many of you may already know, i recently upgraded the computer to not only play ts2 much easier (not lagtastic), but just to play other games a bit faster and just to plain get rid of the onboard craptastic graphics. one extra addition to this upgrade was a 6 channel sound card. added a new set of speakers to the mix (creative inspire 4.1 4400's) and now ive got a pretty well set system. anywho, after trying out about 10 different games so far, i have found that very few games support surround sound. halo and the gta series seems to be the only games i have that support it so far. and gta only uses it to keep the ingame radio and other sound effects separate. i have tried ts2 and didnt notice anything out of the rear speakers, although it might have just been that it was set back to stereo rather than a quad setup (the sound card's config utility seems to act up sometimes). anyone been able to get ts2 to produce surround audio?
that's really odd. after numerous tries, i couldnt get ANYTHING to come out of the rear speakers in ts2. maybe it has to do with the fact that the sound card doesnt fully support EAX? cuz i know there are other games ive tried that say they support EAX yet i still only get stereo sound from them. meh. no biggie.
yep. been working just fine. been watching plenty of movies (which sound GREAT btw), and have been playing a few games that DO support surround sound on here. and the config utility has a speaker test which runs a sound through each individual speaker. it works. im thinking though is that the sound card doesnt support EAX but the games that ive tried do. cuz i know i tried Battlefield 2 which is clearly listed on the EAX site, but i only get stereo sound out of it. and the EAX option in the audio config (in BF2) is greyed out.
Well, what do you know, they're both games by EA. Anyways, the thing you need to remember is that MOST games don't come with surround sound. (Exceptions being Halo and San Andreas). It might become mainstream soon...and then again, AGPs may not be phased out
What sound card are you using? Generally you should be able to set the card to be able to simulate surround sound even if its only getting a stereo input.
its an onboard card. VIA VT1616. and yes, there is a way to "simulate" surround sound like you mention. i do this when i want to listen to the radio in the whole room. but like mentioned above, this card doesnt make use of EAX so ts2 doesnt provide any surround sound on this card. it annoys me on this part though: i was reading into the whole game+surround sound thing. from my understanding, games that use directsound3d not only doesnt require any extra processing unlike EAX, but it will provide surround sound on ANY pc with a multichannel card since its part of directx (which you absolutely CANNOT go without anymore despite what programs you use). yet EAX is still popular amongst developers according to the listing of EAX capable games. maybe its just creative being a whore and bribing all the developers to use their proprietary junk?
