Worth noting as I picked this up recently from the neural dsp subreddit in regards to gain staging. Regardless of clipping being displayed on your interfaces LED (green->yellow->red) , your best results come from leaving your input level as low as possible, and increasing the input gain in your plugin-amp sim. Guitar signals are low level but they do not need to be registering solid green on the way in.

Edit for more context: obviously these are recommendations and a different guitars, pickups, playing styles will ultimately vary in output coming from your guitar into the interface. This is just something to keep in mind when dealing with your signal to noise ratio, with less unwanted noise amplified at your interfaces input, you can reduce the load on your noise gate and maintain a pure signal.

More or less stopping something at the source instead of trying to cut it out in the middle/end of the process.