In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GT 445M v2 are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 6290.

The GT 445M has a 170 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 6290. This results in the GT 445M providing 10.5 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GT 445M has a 170 MHz higher core clock speed and 12 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 6290. This results in the GT 445M providing 7.5 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 6290 was released less than a year after the GT 445M, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GT 445M has 1024 MB video memory, but the Radeon HD 6290 does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 has 144 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6290 has 80. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 445M is 164 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 6290 is 21. The GT 445M having 143 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GT 445M delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 6290.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 requires 35 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6290 requires 9 Watts. The GT 445M requires 26 Watts more than the Radeon HD 6290 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GT 445M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 6290.