In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7450A are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 7450A, but the Radeon HD 7450A has 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 4290. As a result, the Radeon HD 7450A exhibits a 2.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 4290. 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 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 7450A and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 0.2 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 7450A was released over a year more recently than the Radeon HD 4290, and so the Radeon HD 7450A is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the Radeon HD 4290.

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 7450A has 896 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 4290, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon HD 7450A also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon HD 7450A has 12.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 7450A is slightly better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 7450A has 160 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7450A is 68 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18. The Radeon HD 7450A having 50 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 7450A delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 7450A transistor size technology is 15 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 4290. This means that the Radeon HD 7450A is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 4290. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 7450A should consume less power than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 7450A requires 25 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290.