In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce G 205M are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7290.

The GeForce G 205M has a 170 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the Radeon HD 7290. This results in the GeForce G 205M providing 1.4 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 GeForce G 205M has a 170 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 7290 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GeForce G 205M providing 0.7 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 7290 was released over a year more recently than the GeForce G 205M, and so the Radeon HD 7290 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GeForce G 205M.

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 7290 and the GeForce G 205M have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Radeon HD 7290 has 2.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce G 205M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 7290 is marginally better than the GeForce G 205M.

The Radeon HD 7290 has 80 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce G 205M has 16. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7290 is 16 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce G 205M is 18. The GeForce G 205M having 2 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon HD 7290 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 7290 transistor size technology is 50 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce G 205M. This means that the Radeon HD 7290 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce G 205M. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon HD 7290 should consume less power than the GeForce G 205M.

The Radeon HD 7290 requires 9 Watts to run and the GeForce G 205M requires 12 Watts. The GeForce G 205M requires 3 Watts more than the Radeon HD 7290 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce G 205M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 7290.