In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 4290 are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS.

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over three years more recently than the GeForce 7600 GS, 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 GeForce 7600 GS 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 7600 GS 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 GeForce 7600 GS also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce 7600 GS has 12.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce 7600 GS is slightly better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 40 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 7600 GS has 12. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 7600 GS is 5. The Radeon HD 4290 having 13 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce 7600 GS performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce 7600 GS requires 27 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the GeForce 7600 GS, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the Radeon HD 4290.