It's not all hardware based.
A CPU can do absolutely anything - that does not make any solution running on a CPU hardware based. Software is using programmable hardware to do a variety of tasks. Hardware is using specialist hardware to do a limited set of tasks faster than software running on a more general purpose processor. The development of hardware acceleration is essential to efficient designs. Things like video decoding are a gazillion times more efficient thanks to hardware specialised to the job. Audio processing hardware is included in the consoles to do those workloads more efficiently (faster per watt of energy/$ of silicon) than using a CPU.
Running raytracing on GPU is
not hardware acceleration. It's software acceleration, using a fast general purpose highly-parallel processor. Interestingly,
rasterising graphics on the GPU can be considered hardware acceleration as current GPUs are designed for rasterising triangles efficiently and include specialist hardware (texture samplers, ROPS) for that purpose.
This conversation is getting silly and tiresome. Next we'll be calling the CPU a 'hardware game-logic accelerator'.
Caveat: We do have things like hardware IO controllers where the hardware isn't designed to accelerate a task but to shunt the workload off the CPU. I don't think that's ever been referred to as hardware
acceleration, and if it ever has, it shouldn't have been. In conversation, the idea of hardware may be somewhat muddled by people using the term without clarification, so talking about doing audio 'in hardware' without saying 'hardware accelerator'. Obviously you have to have some hardware somewhere to do anything - you can't run games on thin air.