In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7290 are massively better than the Intel GMA 3600.

The Radeon HD 7290 was released less than a year after the GMA 3600, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance 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 Radeon HD 7290 and the GMA 3600 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The memory bandwidth of the Radeon HD 7290 and the GMA 3600 are the same, which means the Radeon HD 7290 and the GMA 3600 have equal limitations when it comes to graphical data transfer.

The Radeon HD 7290 has 80 Shader Processing Units and the GMA 3600 has 4. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7290 is 16 and the actual shader performance of the GMA 3600 is 2. The Radeon HD 7290 having 14 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 7290 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GMA 3600.

The Radeon HD 7290 requires 9 Watts to run and the GMA 3600 requires 13 Watts. The GMA 3600 requires 4 Watts more than the Radeon HD 7290 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GMA 3600 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 7290.