In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 4290 are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce FX 5900XT.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 300 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GeForce FX 5900XT. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 1.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. Neither of these GPUs support DirectX 10 or higher, so Texture Rate holds more weight than when comparing more modern GPUs.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 300 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce FX 5900XT and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 1.2 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 three years more recently than the GeForce FX 5900XT, 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 FX 5900XT 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 HD 4290 and the GeForce FX 5900XT have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GeForce FX 5900XT has 11.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce FX 5900XT is slightly better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has 40 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce FX 5900XT has 4. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce FX 5900XT is 2. The Radeon HD 4290 having 16 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce FX 5900XT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 4290 transistor size technology is 75 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce FX 5900XT. This means that the Radeon HD 4290 is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce FX 5900XT. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 4290 should consume less power than the GeForce FX 5900XT.

The GeForce FX 5900XT requires 35 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 4290.