In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 4290.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 425 MHz higher core clock speed but 4 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the Ti 4800. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the Radeon HD 4290 manages to provide 0.6 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since the Radeon HD 4290 supports up to DirectX 10.1.

The Radeon HD 4290 has a 425 MHz higher core clock speed than the Ti 4800 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 4290 providing 1.7 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. The Radeon HD 4290 supports up to DirectX 10.1, so pixeling performance is not particularly relevant for this GPU. It would be relevant for comparing the Ti 4800 with other old GPUs, but in this case it is probably safe to say that the Radeon HD 4290 is superior.

The Radeon HD 4290 was released over three years more recently than the Ti 4800, 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 4800 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 4800 SE 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 4800 has 4.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 4290, which means that the memory performance of the Ti 4800 is marginally better than the Radeon HD 4290.

The GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE has 4 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 4290 has 40. However, the actual shader performance of the Ti 4800 is 1 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 4290 is 18. The Radeon HD 4290 having 17 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Ti 4800 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 4290 transistor size technology is 95 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Ti 4800. This means that the Radeon HD 4290 is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Ti 4800. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 4290 should consume less power than the Ti 4800.