Should probably ad to my snarky comment:
IIRC since 2003 DirectX supports acceleration of three dimensional sound sources through the OS (Windows) by passing requests between software and sound card driver.
Are devs using that? Or do they just create 5 sound zones tied to the player camera, call them left, mid-left, center, mid-right and right?
I know Activision Blizzards first dable into “real” 3D-Audio was with Overwatch, which uses Dolby Atmos. So that only took one of the bigger dev-studios 13 years to adopt, for 1 game…
OpenGL, introduced in 1992, Supported a bunch of very nice low-level calls to hardware. Which nobody ever used…
And AMD tried hard with Mantle
Since 2016 Vulkan is a thing (as is D3D12, aka DirectX12). Both support low level hardware calls, asynchronous compute ques and many more awesome features.
Guess what! Nvidias hardware implementation of DX11 is still super viable for gaming, meanwhile devs achieve less performance with DX12 than they did in DX11.
Remember when Nvidia launched the RTX series?
Remember how many games supported RTX for the first 3 Months?
0
Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx
Which based on Source2 (somewhat) uses cutting edge hardware in combination with not shit-tier programming to emulate 3D-Audio and Video arround the player!
IIRC Boneworks and two other VR games implemented similar/the same systems, the rest kinda fakes it.
Also the year of 4k gaming is now and the year of the Linux Desktop is the next year!
TL;DR
Game devs are slow.
When Intel anounces problems with their new process, TSMC and Samsung take another hurdle on the path to 5nm. Your typical game dev will maybe implement some features that were cutting edge one year before the project he is working on entered planning phase.
Where we are going:
Nvidia GameWorks (the thing that kills performance on AMD Graphics Cards) supports path-tracing for audio. To my knowledge there are 0 games that support this and 2 demos.
Most modern AAA (← meaning more marketing than dev budget) scale up to 6 cores. That would be allright, however the i7-7700k is not a new CPU anymore.
Dolby Atmos for Headphones and DTS:X Headpones (or Virtual) exist. Creative Labs cards support both (not that modern systems don’t have the power to calculate both on the CPU).
As with 4k gaming, not happening for the next 5 years. Game Devs! Prove me wrong!
please