What is the ports 5.1 sound like compared to dolby pro logic

[invictius]

Very few people must play in surround sound because I can't find anything pertaining to this topic. I'm unable to do 5.1 in hardware at the moment and was wondering whether the audio backend does anything different to dolby pro logic 2 in regards to figuring out which sounds should come out of which speakers? Because if it's practically the same thing, I may as well just send stereo to my receiver and let pro logic do the work.

[Graf Zahl]

Have you ever played a movie in true 5.1? It's not close to the same thing, real separated channels have a lot more definition for their sound.
Unfortunately I cannot do it on my computer because it doesn't play well with my speaker setup that's oriented towards my TV set.