Would uprading your RAM make games run faster/smoother?

Yes! The ram is all that matters

You need 4 ram for windows and low-med gaming 8gig of high to ultra.
No a good GPU is most that matters a cpu an i5 will be great.
And maybe a gtx 660.
To run mine craft almost anything can.
If you said your specs i would be able to tell you if you will require more i would say 3 gig of ram will be enough for windows 7 and minecraft.

It will not hurt anything. But without knowing your current specs and the memory that you have, it is impossible to predict how much it will improve things.

If you are running a 32 bit version of Windows (such as XP) it can't use anything over 4 GB of RAM. So adding more than 4 GB would be worthless.

Also if you are looking to improve the performance of games, increasing the power of the graphic card may do more than increasing the RAM.

Also with most computers if you are over 8 GB adding more will not make a noticeable improvement with most programs.

However as a general ruet, increasing RAM will increase performance. As cheap as it is compared to any other type of upgrade, the first thing to try is always more RAM.

Its hard to be able to answer without knowing the computer specs you have but in general its the onboard ram on the video card that matters most for gaming speed, the ram of your computer system is only "borrowed" to help out when the video card ram is maxed out, so while adding more system ram helps to speed things up when you are doing computer stuff, it may not give you the gaming results you are looking for.

for the best gaming performance the best bang for your buck is to get a new video card with at least 2gb of onboard ram and then max out your motherboards ram capacity as well. This will get you the absolute best out of your system for a long time.

minecraft is such a simple and basic game that if you are having trouble running it then I think you have a very outdated computer that needs to be replaced or its needs serious cleanup of the software and spyware. It could be if its an old computer then it just doesn't have enough ram to operate even simple tasks anymore so I think there are things you can do to make it run better but it depends on what you do with it and how old and outdated the system is. Some older systems are very limited in how much ram they can run so it is possible it may be already be maxed out.

RAM stands for random access memory. RAM is used when you run a program. That program would then be taking up some of your ram. Minecraft does not need that much RAM, 4gb is plenty. But if have other programs open while also running Minecraft, it will run slower.

What you do need is a good graphics card. My Macbook pro only has Intel HD Graphics 3000 which is an integrated graphics card and not a dedicated. Dedicated graphic cards are best. But even with this I get anywhere from 15-40 fps on vanilla Minecraft (low but playable).

So for Minecraft to run faster and smoother you would a decent graphics card and about 8gb of RAM max.(Unless you plan on running a recording program as well then you might want a little more RAM)

Also if you want to check the average fps a graphics card will give you. Go to this website http://www.notebookcheck.net/...check.net/ and type in the name of the graphic card and scroll to the bottom to see the fps on specific games.

Upgrading past 16gb of DDR3 RAM at this point is essentially pointless. Your CPU, and GPU are the two most important factors when it comes to gaming.