The overhead to do the conversions to and from your preferred format on the CPU isn't really significant enough to impact performance. And even on highest quali

The overhead to do the conversions to and from your preferred format on the CPU isn't really significant enough to impact performance. And even on highest quality DACs, you're really only getting 22 bit integer precision out of the ADCs and into the DACs regardless of how the samples are represented. And on cheap ADCs and DACs, it's common to get only 10 or 12 bits of signal to noise ratio. Totally agree though, that 16-bit isn't enough for guitar effects.