To be clear, this topic does not involve HEADPHONES!
At present, I used the sound card of PC to connect some external speakers to achieve 7.1 audio, without using power amplifier equipment, and only used the control panel of onboard sound card to do some basic calibration (such as sound pressure level).
OW2 is about to come out, but also want to upgrade the current peripherals, especially audio this aspect.
All the news tells me that OW supports Doby Atmos, so now the question is,
If I choose to build a Doby Atmos playback environment for the game (7.1.4 to meet the minimum standards), can the OW output all 12CH audio and can the game’s mixer output the complete Doby Atmos model to the decoder?
The cheapest available Doby Atmos 7.2.4 powered amplifier costs about $1,000 and uses HDMI for audio transmission.
Let me know if anyone has tried this, THK!
Of course, I think the monitoring environment used in the development of OW at least exceeds the standard of 7.1.4, so I am very optimistic about this audio scheme.
The whole idea of Dolby Atmos is to emulate surround when using headphones.
Using it for anything else but headphones seems pointless.
First of all, even the Dolby Atmos Sound used for the headset uses 7.1.4CH as the virtual matrix.
And again what I want to talk about is a Dolby Atmos Sound playback system with at least 12 speakers, not headphones.
According to the Dolby website, OW does not support the home theater version of Dolby Atmos Sound .
But what I’m concerned about is if I plug in the ceiling speakers, can the game output the height information of the sound, even if it doesn’t work for Dolby Atmos Sound, such as PCM straight out render audio.
As for why 12 speakers, which is the proposed layout for the Dolby Atmos Sound System.
Or let me put it another way: can OW support 7.1.4CH?
That’s what I thought, but reading about it now and it looks like that’s not exactly the case. Dolby Atmos for Headphones is the specific component that simulates surround sound for two speakers, but the overall Atmos itself is more complicated and works with true surround sound systems. 
The OW has the headphone version. It even says it in the name and when enabling it too.
Overwatch 1 did not support ATMOS for home theatre. Overwatch 2 absolutely does support ATMOS for home theater and it works great. Some games do it better than others. Halo Infinite does a great job with ATMOS and utilizing the overhead speakers. Wonderlands not so much. OW2 is up there with the best. My setup is a series X and a Sony AV unit with 5.1.2 sound. I can’t speak to the PC version but I assume you would have a similar experience. Especially if you are running a 7.1.4 setup. I believe the number of channels that can be used for ATMOS can go up to 64 speakers. The encoding of the data isn’t channel dependent. ATMOS can put a sound in one of 128 different spots in a 3D environment. It is up to the receiver to decode it, and allocate the sound to the speakers. Someone can please correct me if I’m wrong. That is how I understand it.
Thank you, ow1 can no longer be verified.
In order to verify whether ow2 supports 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos, I rushed to our local Genelec store, where they have an audio-visual room that supports Atmos, and I took my itx-PC to test.
The actual results show that: ow2 is confirmed to support Dolby Atmos natively.
I tested in various maps,
The sky surround will give feedback according to the actual situation, but some scenes will not be rendered to the sky sound channel. For example, if you say hello to a robot in the shooting range, the reply will not sound from the sky surround; but the sound of weapons interacting with the scene, footsteps will be Reverb to the sky channel.
According to the previously learned ow’s acoustic logic “importance priority”, I speculate that only the sound of battle and the active lines of characters will be played from the surround box. A good example is that the sound effects of weapon release/swing will be played from the center, but the interaction with the scene, such as the sound of hitting characters and walls, will only be emitted from the main and surround channels.
Secondly, there is an important point. The actual logic of ow2’s panoramic sound support is unknown, but when I tested it, it was obvious that the emphasis of the sky channel would be weak, and some ambient sounds would not reverberate from the sky channel. ; Then I tested enabling upmixing. At this time, the sound of the sky channel will be much more. It can be understood that the Dolby encoder uses the original information to remix the sound. This can make the ambient sound more immersive, but it will lose The positioning accuracy of the rear and side surrounds. In addition, during my test, I also found that the standard calibrated Dolby Atmos system, when used to play ow2, the bass is a little too much, but when I used the 7.1 system to play ow1, this did not happen.