My machine is dual-quad-core Xeon with 12 GB RAM. Is "Large Address Aware" something that will help it run better on this type of machine? I feel like thenwhole game ought to be able to cache to RAM LOL.

Yes.

It will be patched in next week, according to the devs. However, you won't notice a signifikant increase in performance, unless you tweaked the .ini files to render more data than vanilla does. At least that's what the guys at NVIDIA say in their performance guide for Skyrim. Probably better to wait till there have been major improvements to the engine itself.

It will mean that the game can address more than the theoretical 2GB process limit for 32-bit apps, up to a theoretical 4GB (on 64-bit OS).
If, like me, you are got CTDs and graphical issues after some playtime you may find this resolves them.

My Skyrim folder is 6GB, so yes I see no reason you could not put the whole thing in a RAM disk if you wanted to.

It's more for stability than performance, especially on Ultra.

You could setup a 6 -8 GB Ramdisk that loads all of the game files directly to RAM before launching the game and have the game use it instead of the HDD (would take awhile to load everything before you start the game but should help with loading once the game is running since all the info would be coming directly from the RAM instead of the HDD.

I have tried this, its hilarious and it does do as you'd imagine. There's a company that sells a free prog that will do a 4GB space and its a good way to test if you'd like something like that. I liked that particular method because they handled all the pre/post loading by just making it automatically fill the drive with the intended info on boot and resave them to another disk as needed so all I had to do was make a symlink back to the data folder within the main skyrim one and voila ramdisk glory. In the end I took it all down though, its not *that* enormous of a difference between it and a sata3 SSD, its cool but not enormously cool.

4GB is really the maximum addressable process memory in 64-bit Windows?

I'm mainly a Mac user, but that sounds odd to me. 64-bit address space should allow apps to address a heck of a lot more than 4GB. Or maybe it's just that the app is still running in 32-bit mode?

Nah from what I understand the skyrim exe is a 32bit app, and without LAA those are limited to 2GB of memory but with LAA it can go up to 4GB. A true 64bit app on the other hand can use as much ram as 2^64...which is some ungodly number to which I have yet to memorize