In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6250 are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 7290.

The Radeon HD 7290 and the Radeon HD 6250 have both the same core clock speed and the same Texture Fill Rate. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 7290 and the Radeon HD 6250 have both the same core clock speed and the same Pixel Fill Rate. 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 Radeon HD 6250, 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 Radeon HD 6250.

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 6250 has 256 MB video memory, but the Radeon HD 7290 does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

Both the Radeon HD 7290 and the Radeon HD 6250 have 80 Shader Processing Units. While the two GPUs have the same number of SPUs, the actual performance delivered by the Radeon HD 7290 is 16 and by the Radeon HD 6250 is 15. Knowing that the shader performance of the Radeon HD 7290 is superior, it is not necessary to examine the GPUs' respective Texture and Pixel Fill Rates.

The Radeon HD 7290 requires 9 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6250 requires 9 Watts. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.