In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon 9600 PRO are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 300 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the Radeon 9600 PRO. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 1.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since the Radeon HD 4290 supports up to DirectX 10.1.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 300 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon 9600 PRO and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 1.2 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 4290 was released over three years more recently than the Radeon 9600 PRO, and so the Radeon HD 4290 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Radeon 9600 PRO when running the latest games.

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 9600 PRO and the Radeon HD 4290 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Radeon 9600 PRO has 4.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon 9600 PRO is marginally better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon 9600 PRO has 4 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon 9600 PRO is 1 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18. The Radeon HD 4290 having 17 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon 9600 PRO performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 4290 transistor size technology is 75 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon 9600 PRO. This means that the Radeon HD 4290 is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon 9600 PRO. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 4290 should consume less power than the Radeon 9600 PRO.

The Radeon 9600 PRO requires 18 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the Radeon 9600 PRO.