In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 4290 are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 .

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over three years more recently than the Ti 4600, 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 Ti 4600 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 GeForce4 Ti 4600 and the Radeon HD 4290 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Ti 4600 has 5.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Ti 4600 is marginally better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The GeForce4 Ti 4600 has 4 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. However, the actual shader performance of the Ti 4600 is 1 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18. The Radeon HD 4290 having 17 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 4290 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Ti 4600.