In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 4290 are significantly better than the Nvidia Quadro4 700 XGL.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 425 MHz higher core clock speed but 4 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the Quadro4 700 XGL. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the Radeon HD 4290 manages to provide 0.6 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 425 MHz higher core clock speed than the Quadro4 700 XGL and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 1.7 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. The Radeon HD 4290 supports up to DirectX 10.1, so pixeling performance is not particularly relevant for this GPU. It would be relevant for comparing the Quadro4 700 XGL with other old GPUs, but in this case it is probably safe to say that the Radeon HD 4290 is superior.

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over three years more recently than the Quadro4 700 XGL, 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 Quadro4 700 XGL 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 HD 4290 has 64 MB more video memory than the Quadro4 700 XGL, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the Quadro4 700 XGL has superior memory performance.

The Quadro4 700 XGL has 3.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro4 700 XGL is marginally better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Quadro4 700 XGL has 4 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. However, the actual shader performance of the Quadro4 700 XGL is 1 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18. The Radeon HD 4290 having 17 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 4290 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Quadro4 700 XGL.

The Radeon HD 4290 transistor size technology is 95 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Quadro4 700 XGL. This means that the Radeon HD 4290 is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Quadro4 700 XGL. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 4290 should consume less power than the Quadro4 700 XGL.