SO what is this ramdisk? I never heard of it. It looks like it creates a small partition on your hard disk to cache files?

Partition in memory. Hence the name RAMDisk.

How big is the install for that game? I've run games out of ram disks before but I wouldn't have thought Rome II would fit in your average configuration. I'm running 16GB at the moment and I wouldn't think that would be enough in this case.

Hmm. Shame I have 6GB of RAM. Never mind, I'm happy with 30-50fps on very high. Does this fix the fact the font looks like ass? (I somehow doubt it :P)

This is interesting, thanks for posting. I've been having loads of trouble trying to get a consistent framerate pretty much regardless of the settings I try, so I'll try this out later if the incoming patch doesn't help. I only have 8gb RAM but maybe it'll help.

My problem has been that the framerate absolutely nosedives (into slideshow territory) once a decent number of units are in view, and especially during combat. My gpu (HD6950 2gb) is barely breaking a sweat while this is happening according to the monitor and my cpu (i5 2500k) barely gets above 75% usage either, though CPU0 is usually running maxed out.

I assumed the problem was CPU related, but it may well be hard drive related if it's having to stream that much in. It's installed on an SSD at the moment.

For the amount of RAM I'd have to have in order to make RAMdisk convenient I'd much rather just put that money to an SSD, and I seriously doubt the FPS gains are high; if they are then the game probably isn't very well optimised.

I stink at strategy games so I won't be using this, but I think you're amazing for creating this thorough post and I wanna thank you on behalf of anyone it helps :)

Maybe one day when I overcome my strategic disabilities I'll look this thread up and get my Rome 2 going.

It's Total War, of course it isn't.

Ohhh, something to spend my 16 GB of system RAM on! As a side note, is this a piece of shit beg/nag/spy/adware, because it sure looks like it, based upon looking at their website.

@fattony12000: amd has a similar offering thats less sketchy looking http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_4.0.php

In the software world everyone knows hard drives are incredibly slow compared to the other systems of a computer. So no game reads directly from a hard drive, that's why we have load times. Now @buckybit is right, there is a bottleneck for textures and other assets in gaming. This bottleneck isnt between Hard drive and RAM it's between RAM and VRAM. Developers have to optimize to overcome this, like drawing everything of a certain type at the same time. This limits how much time is spent loading textures from RAM to VRAM, which is slow". It's why Sony made a big deal about 8Gb of unified memory. The RAM and VRAM are the same and hence no bottleneck.

Also I'm sure someone will correct me on any inaccuracies.

A ramdisk is a great idea in theory, but it sounds very unstable to me.

What the hell is wrong with this games colors, it looks like they're marching around a dystopian smog world.

Some games stream assets from the hard drive as they need them (Rage for instance). I don't think Rome 2 is doing it though. It loads everything it needs into VRAM as you said. I'm not sure why OP is experiencing improved framerate from having the assets stored on RAMDisk.

Bottleneck for me definitely seems to be a CPU issue. I reckon it's something to do with how the AI is handled leading to CPU0 maxing out while the GPU and other cores are hardly breaking a sweat. My guess is the game dynamically switches between using a basic abstract 'Unit AI' and an 'individual soldier AI' depending on whether they're in view or not / how zoomed in the camera is.