Regardless of whether a video card engine is appropriate for VST processing I’m surprised that Steinberg hasn’t created a VST/VSTi acceleration pci card. I don’t mean a locked down system like UAD or Protools HDX, but simply a card that is designed to effciently off load VST tasks to a separate processor while running Cubase. I know computers are getting faster and faster and performance is certainly less of an issue than it used to be, but I can bring my quad core to its knees pretty quickly with some guitar simulation, a drum plugin and some dynamics effects. Yet I can play back 70 plus tracks of straight audio so it isn’t like disk performance is an issue. It is all about having the processing speed. Of course you can freeze tracks and convert to audio, but keeping your VST’s active all the time would be nice.
I wonder is Steinberg has ever considered such a pci card? A video card manufacturer may even be a good place to start for designing such a device considering their experience with pci pipelines. I don’t know anything about programming at that level, but certainly it must be possible?