In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce G 210M are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7290.

The GeForce G 210M has a 345 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the Radeon HD 7290. This results in the GeForce G 210M providing 2.8 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 210M has a 345 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 7290 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GeForce G 210M providing 1.4 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 three years more recently than the GeForce G 210M, and so the Radeon HD 7290 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GeForce G 210M 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 GeForce G 210M has 512 MB video memory, but the Radeon HD 7290 does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The Radeon HD 7290 has 80 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce G 210M has 16. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7290 is 16 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce G 210M is 24. The GeForce G 210M having 8 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GeForce G 210M delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 7290.

The Radeon HD 7290 requires 9 Watts to run and the GeForce G 210M requires 14 Watts. The GeForce G 210M requires 5 Watts more than the Radeon HD 7290 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce G 210M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 7290.