In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 3470 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 3470 has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the Radeon HD 4290. This results in the Radeon HD 3470 providing 0.4 GTexel/s better texturing performance. 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 3470 has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 4290 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 3470 providing 0.4 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 Radeon HD 3470, 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 Radeon HD 3470.

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 3470 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 Radeon HD 3470 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon HD 3470 has 15.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 3470 is slightly better than the Radeon HD 4290.

Both the Radeon HD 4290 and the Radeon HD 3470 have 40 Shader Processing Units. While the two GPUs have the same number of SPUs, the actual performance delivered by the Radeon HD 3470 is 32 and by the Radeon HD 4290 is 32. Knowing that the shader performance of the Radeon HD 3470 is superior, it is not necessary to examine the GPUs' respective Texture and Pixel Fill Rates.

The Radeon HD 3470 requires 30 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the Radeon HD 3470, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the Radeon HD 4290.