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What do you mean by headphone surround sound. You mean sound beyond what audio producers intended? Like extra processing of the sound?
It's more complicated than that.
You could read my PC gaming audio guide for the details.
The gist of it is that older PC games were designed to be played on PCs with sound cards that had hardware DSPs that could add reverb/chorus/occlusion/etc. effects as the game developers best saw fit. Without the DSP features, the effects go missing, and it's NOT as the developers intended it to sound anymore.
Newer PC games (roughly everything from 2007 onward) do everything in software these days, so you aren't really missing any audio effects...but for headphone use, the software mixers in use treat them as only capable of one-dimensional left/right stereo panning. You have no cues of front and rear, let alone above and below. That's what technologies like CMSS-3D Headphone and Dolby Headphone provide.
Ironically, the former works even better under the old hardware-accelerated audio APIs because with the way they worked, they sent the 3DPA data to the sound card for mixing instead of pre-mixing and then sending to the sound card driver like current games do, resulting in a virtual 5.1/7.1 setup. No sense of height whatsoever that way.
Isn't the song from games usually bad quality? So it won't matter that much right? If you have a good IEM or not?
Sound effects and music in games generally aren't presented to audiophile standards, to put it nicely, but that doesn't mean you won't benefit from a sound card and the right set of headphones. There's a reason
my PC gaming audio guide and
Mad Lust Envy's gaming headphone guide exist in the first place.
Long story short, some headphones bring out positional cues from binaural mixes like no other. It's like being right there in the action, having an aural wallhack of sorts.
