You don't need the optical cable to the pc, the hdmi connection has higher bandwidth and quality over the optical. There's no case where you would want to use the optical output over your hdmi for that
I do if I want to use the sound card built into the motherboard vs using the audio chip in the video card.
In my case, my motherboard has a better audio chip than the video card.
The biggest difference is that HDMI can pass higher-resolution audio, including the formats found on Blu-ray: Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio. These formats can't get transmitted across optical.
Might want to read up. I think your card will have to be super super super old to not pass hdmi capable of that instead of optical.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/hdmi-vs-optical-which-digital-audio-connection-to-use/
I have an XFX AMD Radeon™ RX 5700 XT 8GB GDDR6 THICC III Ultra.
AMD cards do not do HDMI audio pass through, they have their own built in HD audio chip. This really hasn't been a problem until Dolby Atmos became a thing. So AMD is going to have to add in a proper audio pass through setting. I'm not going to hold my breath on this as people have been complaining for awhile now in AMD's own official forums.
After looking at my options, including dongles, for the audio signal I'm going to stick with the Optical Cable carrying audio to the TV. I'll plug the sound bar into the TV using HDMI & EARC and let the TV do the rest of the work.
I'll simply use my blu-ray player & the smart Apps on the TV for streaming content and video playback. The TV will ignore my PC while those are running and everything will properly play back out of the sound bar.
https://www.lg.com/us/sound-bars/lg-sp8ya-sound-bar
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-48-class-c1-series-oled-4k-uhd-smart-webos-tv/6453311.p (I'm waiting until the new C2 model comes out later this year.)
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