The best of competitive sound now is the Sennheiser GSX which is an external USB DAC/Amp. It has a good 7.1 to headphones mode that gets you about the best surround sound on headphones for games/movies you can get, it impacts the tone the least and has one of the best HRTF's I have heard in eyars. But it pales in comparison to the cards we had 20 years ago, I miss my Aureal A3D.
Ditto, I can't say how much of it is pure nostalgia, but I feel like Counter Strike 1.x on my old Turtle Beach Montego II gave better positional sound than any game/hardware does nowadays.
The differences may be all in my head, but I've been very happy with a USB Dragonfly DAC and a pair of quality headphones, along with high/master quality input.
In Overwatch it was when I tried that a few years ago. While Atmos gave you some sense of vertical positioning generally it wasn't correct and I struggled with positioning. Theoretically Atmos ought to be miles better, its object based like the sound cards of the early 2000s but in practice they have got something wrong in the headphones implementation and positioning is hard to pick out. Its better than just stereo but the positioning is a lot better on the Sennheiser device.
Whether Dolby Atmos has improved since then or other games have implemented it better I don't know. I feel like we probably need an open source implementation middleware for object sound to headphone/surround speakers to really fix the situation.
