Does anyone know whether Audacity (2.02) currently or in the near future, will support Windows 8 enabled audio hardware decode acceleration/offloading? I think I saw something in the Wiki about this for MacOS, but no mention of Win8. If it’s already supported, where in the settings can I twiddle the enable or disable? And yes, I will need capable hardware and drivers 
MSDN reference:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/br259116.aspx
Thanks!
Looking at figure 2 of the proposed software/hardware audio offloading architecture, the proposals appear to be relevant at driver level - between WASAPI and endpoint. Audacity does not deal with the audio hardware directly, it does not even deal directly with the audio drivers. Audacity accesses the audio system via Portaudio.
I’ve moved this to the Windows board, even though you weren’t asking for help. This question is probably more likely to be searched for there.
It looks like this is to some extent undoing the changes in Vista where hardware access for the existing Windows audio API’s (MME and DirectSound) was removed, and the new WASAPI API only had hardware access through the WaveRT driver (but there was no hardware acceleration I’m aware of).
Presumably the proposal directly targets tablet computers (hardware acceleration for audio is much more common on mobile operating systems in order to save battery life).
Audacity clearly won’t support this hardware offload proposal on two counts 1) we don’t yet support WASAPI which I think is required 2) only Windows Store Apps (“Modern” or “Metro” Style) will be allowed to use hardware offloading. Audacity is a “Classic” or “Desktop” application and there are no plans to rewrite it as a “Modern” app.
Gale