As I have said in several occasions, my workflow rely heavily on virtual Instruments, usually NI FM7 and NI Kompakt, So I have tested in detail how the Sound Blaster Hardware based digital sampler (via SoundFont synthesizer engine) could improve my workflow compared with my favorite sampler (NI Kompakt).
The main advantage of the Sound Blaster sampler is that it doesn't drain CPU power because it rely on it s own CPU in the card. But its disadvantages early appears because it uses System memory to store the instruments (in Sound font format) as any virtual sampler does, so we are limited to System RAM, and there isn't any kind of "play samples from disk" technology (as Halion or Kompakt/kontakt have) that allows to load more instruments than the available System RAM. And the worst thing is that the sound fonts instruments must be load "manually" to each different project with the Sound Blaster utility, while the kompakt or Halion particular setup is automatically open in each cubase, Logic etc. project.
If you set a soundfont (a GM sound bank) as automatically load at startup, the computer always loss the amount of RAM it needs, ie if I setup a 512 Mb Sound font as startup sound font, my system always will have this 512 Mb of ram un-avaliable for other tasks.
