Sample rate and latency

The reason you see the latency cut in half is that the buffer in question is specified in samples. So at 96K samples per second the buffer will fill twice as fast as at 48K. On the other hand at 96K the programs and CPU will need to process twice as many samples per second, so the workload also doubles. If you are not getting dropouts with the same size buffer at 96K you can certainly do that, but you might also be able to reduce the buffer size at 48K and get the same effect without adding to file sizes and processing demand.