No surround sound in The Witcher 3

[Hiradur]

I have a 5.1 speaker system and since Lutris Wine build version ~6.13 (can't remember exactly), every game that I tried and is supposed to have it, has working 5.1 surround sound. Before this Wine release, most games had working 5.1 surround sound but a few didn't (e.g. World in Conflict and Prince of Persia 2008).

Anyway, The Witcher 3 is the only game left in my list which doesn't output 5.1 surround sound. I only ever got it to output stereo so far. I tried several Lutris Wine builds (currently lutris-7.1-x86_64) and various audio settings. Both my system and the Wine bottle have PulseAudio configured for 5.1 output. As far as I'm aware, The Witcher 3 cannot be forced to output 5.1, instead it automatically detects the number of channels from the system, which apparently doesn't work in Wine (at least for me). I have not tried with upstream Wine or Wine-staging builds.

I use the GOG release of The Witcher 3 version v 1.31 on Ubuntu 20.04 with PulseAudio and an NVidia GTX 760 GPU, the proprietary NVidia driver (currently version 470.103.01) and output 5.1 audio as PCM via HDMI to an AV-receiver.

[tannisroot]

I have not tried with upstream Wine or Wine-staging builds.
If you can, could you please?

[Hiradur]

Matrix of the tests I performed, a check mark indicates working 5.1 surround sound in The Witcher 3:

• Upstream Wine compiled from git:

  • Release 7.1 (tag wine-7.1)
  • Release 7.2 (tag wine-7.2)
  • master (commit bf42dca35f05bce9996e91f59cc47b5a9e6996b2)

• Wine staging patchset applied and compiled:

  • Wine staging commit 99c88fee27290ffe723cb47ade32a44807ad9430 applied to Wine commit bf42dca35f05bce9996e91f59cc47b5a9e6996b2

• Lutris builds:

  • lutris-7.1-x86_64

It seems that surround sound doesn't work in The Witcher 3 only with the lutris builds. I used the same Wine bottle for all these test and used Lutris' Configure menu to switch between Wine builds, which caused an update to the Wine prefix on every switch. At the end, I switched to the lutris build again and surround sound didn't work again.

[tannisroot]

Could you test with wine-ge-custom wine?

[Hiradur]

5.1 surround sound also doesn't work with wine-ge-custom (used the binary releases from the releases page).

Tested:

• lutris-ge-7.2-2-x86_64
• lutris-ge-7.1-1-x86_64

[Hiradur]

Surround sound in The Witcher 3 works with:

• lutris-GE-Proton7-20