If you are going to be using any form of Analog output, and eventually all outputs become analog, as your ears aren't digital, quality matters. How much is up to the individual.
The best analog outputs are going to be found as far away from the computer as possible, usually on a home stereo amplifier type device.
In the long run, most sounds a computer is going to generate are pre-recorded. There is hardly anything being synthesized or created on the fly by the sound hardware. And in fact, since Windows Vista, the sound processing and mixing has been moved to software, to give greater flexibility in volume control and other added effects.
I think you need to ask yourself a few questions, concerning what you may want from your sound equipment, and that will pretty much determine what device will fill your needs.
As Sid, err I mean, Presler,
seems to be pointing out, the pre-encoded stuff is pretty much not going to benefit from money spent on an add-in sound device. Really what you're paying for, and I think I mentioned already, but will reiterate just in case, in the case of an add-in board, or even some on-board (integrated on motherboard) solutions is better quality DAC (Digital-to-Analog) circuitry, better quality amps (despite their low power), and more connectivity options.
Essentially, if you plug anything into the analog output of your sound device, add-in boards almost always have the advantage.
Once you plug into the digital coaxial output or TOSLINK (optical) however, you are effectively taking most of the circuitry of an add-in board out of the equation. So, you have to ask yourself, are you going to be using digital or analog to connect to your sound equipment?
If digital, you may be served perfectly fine by the HDMI audio of your graphics device. Works perfectly fine for movies, where the audio track is simply being regurgitated by the computer verbatim and sent to an external amplifier that has it's own speakers, such as you would find in a home theater type setup. When sending the audio this way, no matter how much you pay, the audio is sent over protected channels and you don't even have the ability to change the volume in Windows, much less modify with your sound card.
However, if you play games and expect surround, you may find you have a need for real time encoding into either DDL (Dolby Digital Live [a 5.1 audio format]) or DTS Connect (Digital Theater Sound [an alternative 5.1 audio format to DDL]) so that your game's positional audio is correctly sent to the corresponding speakers. The reason there is a need for the DDL or DTS Connect encoding is that the original TOSLINK and Digital Coaxial audio standards were not designed to transmit more than stereo (2 channel) sound. That's not very groovy these days, so thankfully some smart thinkers devised ways of encoding 5.1 channels into the two stereo channels, and properly equipped amplifiers can easily decode the signal and give you the delicious surround you're after.
Unfortunately, there are trade-offs to the encoding, such as fidelity loss and phase change delay, but thankfully for most consumers, they wouldn't know it if they saw (heard) it!
If you're not using analog output, not needing DTS Connect or DDL encoding, you should do perfectly fine with the audio from your graphics card.
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