In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce 9400 GT, but the GeForce 9400 GT has 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 4290. As a result, the GeForce 9400 GT exhibits a 1.6 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 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce 9400 GT and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 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 Radeon HD 4290 was released over a year more recently than the GeForce 9400 GT, 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 GeForce 9400 GT.

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 HD 4290, 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 12.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce 9400 GT is slightly better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 40 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 9400 GT has 16. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 9400 GT is 9. The Radeon HD 4290 having 9 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce 9400 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 4290 transistor size technology is 10 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce 9400 GT. This means that the Radeon HD 4290 is expected to run very slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce 9400 GT. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 4290 should consume less power than the GeForce 9400 GT.

The GeForce 9400 GT requires 50 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 GeForce 9400 GT, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the Radeon HD 4290.