In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 210 1GB are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 111 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce 210 1GB, but the GeForce 210 1GB has 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 4290. As a result, the GeForce 210 1GB exhibits a 1.9 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 111 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce 210 1GB and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 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 less than a year after the GeForce 210 1GB, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance 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 GeForce 210 1GB has 896 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 4290, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GeForce 210 1GB also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce 210 1GB has 8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce 210 1GB is marginally better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 40 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 210 1GB has 16. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 210 1GB is 22. The GeForce 210 1GB having 4 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GeForce 210 1GB delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 4290.

The GeForce 210 1GB transistor size technology is 15 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 4290. This means that the GeForce 210 1GB is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 4290. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the GeForce 210 1GB should consume less power than the Radeon HD 4290.

The GeForce 210 1GB requires 31 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 210 1GB, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the Radeon HD 4290.