In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 4290 are noticeably better than the Nvidia Quadro NVS 420.

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over a year more recently than the Quadro NVS 420, 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 Quadro NVS 420.

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 Quadro NVS 420 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 Quadro NVS 420 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro NVS 420 has 11.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro NVS 420 is slightly better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The Quadro NVS 420 has 16 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. However, the actual shader performance of the Quadro NVS 420 is 9 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18. The Radeon HD 4290 having 9 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Quadro NVS 420 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Quadro NVS 420 requires 40 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 Quadro NVS 420.