In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT are significantly better than the AMD Radeon X1050.

The GeForce 9400 GT has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed and 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon X1050. This results in the GeForce 9400 GT providing 2.8 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since the GeForce 9400 GT supports up to DirectX 10.

The GeForce 9400 GT has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon X1050 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GeForce 9400 GT providing 0.6 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 GeForce 9400 GT was released over a year more recently than the Radeon X1050, and so the GeForce 9400 GT is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the Radeon X1050.

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 GeForce 9400 GT has 384 MB more video memory than the Radeon X1050, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GeForce 9400 GT also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce 9400 GT has 7.5 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon X1050, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce 9400 GT is marginally better than the Radeon X1050.

The GeForce 9400 GT has 16 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon X1050 has 4. However, the actual shader performance of the GeForce 9400 GT is 9 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon X1050 is 1. The GeForce 9400 GT having 8 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GeForce 9400 GT delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon X1050.

The GeForce 9400 GT transistor size technology is 45 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon X1050. This means that the GeForce 9400 GT is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon X1050. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the GeForce 9400 GT should consume less power than the Radeon X1050.

The GeForce 9400 GT requires 50 Watts to run and the Radeon X1050 requires 24 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GeForce 9400 GT and a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the Radeon X1050. The GeForce 9400 GT requires 26 Watts more than the Radeon X1050 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce 9400 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon X1050.