Windows 8 and hardware acceleration for sound cards ?

Does windows 8 offer hardware acceleration for sound processing in sound cards ? Or sounds are processed mainly via cpu ? I found a link claiming that accelaration does exist Windows 8 brings back the direct Audio Hardware Acceleration [just like old times - XP]

Vista/Windows 7 sound drivers work in Windows 8. I have my RealTek plus my recording studio sound devices and all are working properly with Windows 7 drivers.

There was a change in the way some sound functions were handled between XP and Vista/Win 7 and the reason XP drivers do not work or work correctly in Vista/Win7 (and Win 8).

But, I have not noticed any difference in sound quality between XP and Vista/Win 7 with my recording studio hardware and to be truthful, the current technology RealTek sounds better than the SoundBlaster Audigy sound card I was using in Win XP.

The default sound drivers (the generic ones) that come with a freshly installed windows 8 are probably the best. The truth is that audio drivers haven't changed much in the last 20 years. Underneath it is all the same software, it's just repackaged with new layers to interact with kernel timers.
By the way, accelerated audio is a joke. It never existed. I call it phantom technology. All they did was put the audio service as the highest priority right behind video, so it was a way to deliberately hobble audio so they could sell you a card that had a 1 instead of a 0 in its settings so it could bus-master, or come close to real time priority by turning on certain timing channel features which were already present from day one to begin with on every audio card.
If anyone can give me a detailed whitepaper explaining exactly what audio accelearation is and how it worked with the hardware I will admit I am wrong, but I don't think I am from my research.