Is anyone playing with the Elite textures on an SSD? Does it reduce lag when using the Elite Textures? I just got a 256GB SSD, and I'm moving some games over to it that I think might benefit. My video card is a GTX760 with 4GB of vram, but even then the elite textures seem to lag a lot. CPU is a Phenom II x6 1090T 3.2ghz, and I have 12GB vram.

Nah, its pretty normal for Elite textures to cause this stutter, so save your SSD for something else. ;)
I mean, the problem is not that your HDD is slow, but the game itself - it's not a bug, it's a feature. :D

Solid State Disks are faster, so you can speed up things where data reading is the bottleneck. As your RAM and Video RAM is big enough, it rather speeds up loading, but not running common games. Although big textures can pretty fast fill your graphics card memory, the bottleneck is still processing them, hence it's usually the GPU and not the reloading of data. As Windows always uses a pagefile, no matter how big your RAM is, you can speed up all programs by moving it to the SSD (or better use it as your system disk and install Windows there).

I put my Page File on the SSD to force Windows to keep it there.

Actually, I just realized that I haven't played in a while. Nvidia added a shader cache to their drivers recently, and it improved performance and removed the stutter/lag in open world games like Saints Row 3 and Skyrim for me. Maybe the game will run better now anyway.

I hope it's not a CPU bottleneck. My CPU is still just fine for most new games, but it struggles on some older, single-thread games :/

*edit* I was planning on putting Windows on it, but my boot drive is 320GB and even though it's using far less than 250GB, because of the size difference nothing would let me clone it over. It's running fine, anyway, so I think I'd rather save the space for games. All my other games are installed on a 3TB HDD, it's just for game installs. I like to spread stuff over multiple drives.

I don't know about sacred 2, but the witcher 1 game, run more smooth from ssd, and I let the page file, cache, etc of windows on ssd, after all, I buy ssd to use now...

Thats not true!

The GPUs (even midrange) are strong enough to process big textures, or even really big textures compared to the standard textures most games have, at almost no cost. When big textures really start to lower the FPS (I am talking of about 10 percent and more) the most common problem is that the Memory of the GPU is to small, so that textures have to be reloaded (if you are lucky from RAM and not the harddisk) and reprocessed (time consuming, especially for slower cards) over and over again instead of just using the ready textures to continue rendering frames (which takes almost the same time independent of the textures size). As far as I know it wasnt a shader cache it was an improved storing of image data (textures) so that they need less space in the RAM of the GPU, because of better compression, so that the described stuff I mentioned above doesnt happen that often. For skyrim it could be a CPU bottleneck, because it does heavy use of the CPU as far as I know. One reason is, that they use the CPU based Havok physics engine and furthermore they do much stuff on the CPU that is today done on the GPU. Windows creates a pagefile only as long as you havent disabled it, which can of course be done, even if its not recommend (because some software rely on it).

But even if it creates it, this doesnt mean that the file is really used that much that it would decrease the performance when enough RAM is available so that the difference should be marginal, no matter where you put it.

Still you are right, that the file should be located on the SSD if you want to get the best performance, but you also have to consider that the file gets written very often and this can decrease the lifetime of a SSD!

You're absolutely right. I chose the wrong words. I wanted to say that with 4 GB video memory the system should be able to handle the big textures and that the bottleneck with this amount of VRAM/RAM is rather picture processing (e.g. with high resolutions and effects) and not the processing of the textures. Although, if the game is badly optimized (e.g. by using to many textures per model) it could still be a memory issue because of the sheer amount of data needed due to loading a lot of textures. The SSD would help a bit, but as you stated, reloading from harddisk is the worst case. The 12 GB RAM might be more helpful in this case eventually.

I put it on the SSD, runs worse than I remember tbh, and I'm not even using the elite texture pack. Before I was using the disk install, this time it's the Steam version which includes the expansion. Maybe the Steam version runs worse?

In any case, the SSD didn't seem to help anything. I suspect my CPU is the bottleneck, and just poor optimization. Sure is a beautiful game, though.

Nope, your CPU is fine. It's really because of poor optimization.