Okay, I acknowledge there are two games for the Mac offering surround sound. I understand there is another: World of Warcraft. Let's say that there are probably another 10 or 20. That doesn't add up to much if none of those games are of the genre that one might want to play. In other words, no choice at all. So I shall change my statement to, "the vast majority of games ported to the Mac do not include surround sound because the Mac game publishers claim the Mac is a 2-channel computer and have not made the effort to include 3D audio". It is silly to say that a statement from a publisher is "bunk" when that simply is their stated policy. Why bother including surround sound when the vast majority of Mac owners don't want or are unaware that it is possible on a Mac.
Now to my question. You said that UT2004 and DOOM3 can do surround sound on a Mac. Please clarify this for me. Are you using the optical out to a decoder and speakers? Or some other method? I'd love to know.
A couple of years ago, I was playing a Blizzard game on my PMG5. The game claimed it had 3D surround sound. The G5 offers an optical out digital connection. I fitted a set of 5.1 surround sound speakers with optical decoder. No game audio could be found. Not even 2-channel. I had to revert to the 2-channel headphone socket to get sound. Does the Mac Pro's optical out line function any better? I was told back then, no the optical line is useless for games, you need the M-Audio Revolution 5.1, a PCI sound card with MacOSX drivers. I never bought one because I was seriously into PC gaming and I had abandoned any wish to be further messed about by the Mac games situation.
Now this is where I stand: My new Mac can now run Windows and Windows games. Windows 3D games are nearly all offering surround sound, even those dating from perhaps the year 2000. So why would I ever want to buy a game ported to the Mac? Especially as it could be up to a year old when the Mac publisher releases it and in all likelihood it has only 2-channel audio. Need I mention the number of games for PC that never make it to MacOS? Some of my favourites are Windows-only.
So, long ago, I stopped buying Mac games and built PCs that could do surround sound. I will now abandon my PCs and play my Windows game on the Mac Pro and obtain 3D audio from ALL of them with the Audigy2 NX, hoping it works.
Sure I will experiment to see what sort of a job Boot Camp has done to pass Windows games surround sound to the optical out port. As yet I do not have a set of decoding speakers available to try this out. With Boot Camp still in beta, I'm a little bit pessimistic. Am I in for a treat?
A final observation. None of my PCs, having 5.1 audio, could shovel encoded digital audio down through the optical line to my powered speakers with decoder. Three different decoder speaker sets were tried. In order to obtain my games' surround sound on the PC I found I always needed to take the discrete analog channel feeds from my sound cards to the speaker control box. The optical line was useless and the digital audio was best decoded to analog inside the computer. We don't have that choice on Macs.
I could go on but I'm burned out. And I'm boring the readers. I have to go do a lot of testing now on the Mac Pro.
