In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 4290 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 3200 IGP.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 200 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 3200. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 0.8 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 200 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 3200 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 0.8 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over a year more recently than the HD 3200, and so the Radeon HD 4290 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 3200.

Both GPUs exhibit very poor performance, so rather than upgrading from one to the other you should consider looking at more powerful GPUs. Neither of these will be able to run the latest games in any playable way.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 128 MB video memory, but the HD 3200 does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

Both the Radeon HD 3200 IGP and the Radeon HD 4290 have 40 Shader Processing Units. While the two GPUs have the same number of SPUs, the actual performance delivered by the Radeon HD 4290 is 18 and by the HD 3200 is 18. Knowing that the shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is superior, it is not necessary to examine the GPUs' respective Texture and Pixel Fill Rates.