It’s fairly common to get external audio interfaces either for the number of inputs and outputs they can provide or for the interface types. There are still so

It’s fairly common to get external audio interfaces either for the number of inputs and outputs they can provide or for the interface types. There are still some that also include DSPs which used to be extremely useful for taking some load off the system, but that a normally only helpful if those are being run on the inputs or you can do all the other parts of the mixing that follows that processing on the card itself. It’s noticeable that those plugins are generally being ported to run on host CPUs these days because we are much less constrained than we use to be in that regard.