Whoa.....
Alright. First, there is no uncompressed/compressed PCM, PCM is an algorithm for representing an analog wave digitally and has been around since the beginning of the 1900's. This is not the only algorithm out there, there's pulse width modulation, pulse position, pulse density, delta-sigma (which is used with DSD), and others but PCM is by far the standard (for audio). PCM itself comes in a couple of flavors, regular PCM where quantization levels is a function of amplitude, and LPCM where quantization levels are uniformly linear (hence linear pulse code modulation).
Since PCM is an algorithm, compressed/noncompressed doesn't make any sense from a technical standpoint, it takes an input and gives you an output and doesn't care what the data is.
Because this is the standard (for audio), pretty much everything uses it AVR, pre/pro, stereo receiver, sound cards/on board sound, pretty much everything that deals with converting digital to audio (and audio to digital) uses PCM at the bottom of the chain.
But like a lot of things it takes on new meanings though it's not necessarily correct in the strictest sense, in this instance many people also include the digital output as just "PCM" also. Well, it's just a data file you can call it PCM data file but when it's just referred to as PCM misunderstandings happen (and the thing you have to understand is that going from analog to digital isn't 1 to 1, going from digital to analog is though so in a broad general sense PCM is a lossy compression algorithm itself). That data file isn't very useful unless you know the parameters used by the PCM encoding so we use headers and containers for streaming/storage.
Wav, aiff, flac, ogg, mp3, DD, DTS, etc are all containers, some happen to be more than just that such as flac, mpeg, DD, DTS (and others) which are also a compression algorithm(some lossy, some lossless) and/or encoding scheme. When you play any of these formats, they all are converted to PCM data for the DAC to use. Yes, I know, you see chips that include DD/DTS decoding and they do that, but it's still a conversion to PCM data first before converted to analog.
So back to the original post:
First correction, all AVR's and digital stereo/receiver will play a PCM stream as far as I know, perhaps multichannel PCM isn't available for all though. I don't think it's really ever listed in marketing...or even some manuals at this time.
So, PCM vs DD/DTS. As you can see above, that question doesn't really make any sense. Since we are talking about a data file, we don't have to use a analog to digital converter to create a data file (think synthesizers and such), so you can create an extremely good quality DD datafile and a poor quality PCM data file on the computer where the DD will be far better than the PCM data. Now I know most people look at that question and assume that the DD/DTS data is created from the PCM data in which case the answer would be yes, PCM data would be better than lossy DD/DTS and would be equal to the HD encoding, but your question is in reference to gaming and alot of the stuff out there is computer generated.
/faq.yamaha.com/us/en/article/music-production/recorders/pocketrak_cx/4918/2840/what_is_the_difference_between_linear_pcm_and_mp3_recording
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