In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon X800 SE are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over three years more recently than the Radeon X800 SE, 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 X800 SE 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 X800 SE 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 X800 SE also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon X800 SE has 51.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon X800 SE is much better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 40 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon X800 SE has 12. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon X800 SE is 3. The Radeon HD 4290 having 15 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon X800 SE performs better when taking into account other relevant data.