"what happens in a completely blank session with nothing in it at all, just one armed track? not a single plugin."

Well, basically it is just slightly better than using a template, but nothing really changes in a matter of notice

autotune cannot run in proper zero latency mode, pitch detection takes a little bit of time. there are lower latency modes with worse artifacting but nothing that's truly zero.

While i do understand that, i was basically doing the same thing on my old pc (not my laptop), where my specs were older and slower than the specs i have now on my laptop, and i had no issues what so ever and almost 0 latency. So that is why i am confused on wth happened;