Hello Rikki
Out of the box a computer operating system is set up to give a good overall performance with all Software and Programs, this is because it is unknown what the computer is to be used for, however the settings are made available to optimise it for a specific task. (Please remember that if it is optimised for 1 task, it will reduce the performance on other tasks)
A good demonstration of the performance difference attained by optimising settings can be easily seen by the difference in performance between the standard general purpose Windows Sound Driver, and the optimised ASIO driver.
Hope this helps

Bill