In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 4290 are significantly better than the Nvidia Quadro NVS 290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 240 MHz higher core clock speed than the Quadro NVS 290, but the Quadro NVS 290 has 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 4290. As a result, the Quadro NVS 290 exhibits a 0.9 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 240 MHz higher core clock speed than the Quadro NVS 290 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 1 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 Quadro NVS 290, 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 Quadro NVS 290.

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 Quadro NVS 290 has 128 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 4290, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Quadro NVS 290 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro NVS 290 has 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro NVS 290 is marginally better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Quadro NVS 290 has 16 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. The two GPUs are based on different architectures, but deliver an equivalent shader performance. To compare, we must continue to look at the memory bandwidth, Texture and Pixel Rates. In this case, the Quadro NVS 290 has 0.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate and 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth, but the Radeon HD 4290 has 1 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate. Although the GPUs are very similar in performance, the Quadro NVS 290 takes the edge.

The Radeon HD 4290 transistor size technology is 25 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Quadro NVS 290. This means that the Radeon HD 4290 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Quadro NVS 290. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 4290 should consume less power than the Quadro NVS 290.

The Quadro NVS 290 requires 21 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290.