DirectSound automatically takes advantage of accelerated sound hardware, including hardware mixing and hardware sound-buffer memory. Your application does not need to query the hardware or program specifically to use hardware acceleration.
However, for you to make the best possible use of the available hardware resources, you can query DirectSound to receive a full description of the hardware capabilities of the sound device. From this information, you can specify which sound buffers should receive hardware acceleration.
Because your application determines when to use each effect, when to play each sound buffer, and what priority each buffer should take, it can allocate hardware resources as it needs them.