I have a 7.1 home theater system connected to my PC through a Creative X-Fi card (analog direct connections to the receiver) so needless to say that’s how I do my gaming. I was testing the audio functionality with the Unreal Tournament pre-alpha and found that when I have Windows’ speaker config set to 5.1, UE games that use XAudio2 utilize the subwoofer/LFE channel where as when I have Windows set to 7.1 those same games fail to use the LFE channel while they do properly utilize 7 speakers out of the 8 available. I also tested this against other games that don’t use UE but use XAudio2 and those games were not affected by this, those particular games still did not use the LFE channel in either 5.1 or 7.1 configurations so it seems to be an issue with the XAudio2 implementation in UE.
I don’t use bass redirection if I don’t have to (my receiver doesn’t support it in direct analog mode) and I verified that bass redirection was disabled when in 5.1 mode, not only in the Windows speaker config and the Creative config, but by playing other XAudio2 games that lacked LFE output. Also, this doesn’t affect games that use other audio APIs, just XAudio2.
This is the line from the UT pre-alpha log that says it recognizes the configuration:
LogInit: XAudio2 using ‘Speakers (Creative SB X-Fi)’ : 8 channels at 48 kHz using 32 bits per sample (channel mask 0x63f)
LogInit: FAudioDevice initialized.
The only thing particularly odd about this is that my device is set to 24bit/96kHz yet 32bit/48kHz is what UE is reporting; id Tech 5 games that use XAudio2 properly detect 24/96.
These were the games I tested and found to have this problem:
Unreal Tournament pre-alpha
Bulletstorm
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Killer is Dead
Deadlight