[Tinwarble]

MPEG LA licensing doesn't require the product to be tested in the lab. Both Dolby and DTS require the product to be tested before licensing. It seldom happens after the product is released. I am not saying that it can never happen, I just haven't seen it in 10+ years of my work. There can always be a first to everything

But unless you have some inside info you're not telling us about , we don't know what the actual capabilities of the SoC are or what testing it has gone through. It could after all have been tested just Nvidia never licensed it.

Why would anyone need anything more than passthrough for HD audio codecs?

Unless your receiver is really really old.

That's actually a good point, if you don't have have a AVR or other equipment that can process HD audio, then most likely it's not going to handle 7.1 LPCM and decoding and downmixing to 2 channel is usually done on the DTS core. The only reason would be for TrueHD, were only the HD audio track is available and needs to be downmixed to 2 channel.