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We won't know for certain until the actual hardware comes out, but that's still months away and as we've already reported, there are scalpers trying to sell their reserved units for as much as $5,000. We've put together some thoughts and estimates on the Steam Deck hardware to discuss where it might land in terms of performance and experience. Or at least, that was our initial concern, but after poking around at some lesser GPUs and APUs, we're confident that the Steam Deck will be able to handle just about any game at its native 1280x800 resolution. As such, the hardware might not feel nearly as fast as we'd like. The problem is that where the Switch runs games custom designed for the hardware, the Steam Deck has a massive backlog of PC games that definitely weren't built with a handheld device in mind.
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It seems like a well designed little handheld, and compared to the Nintendo Switch hardware, it's easy to get carried away with just how much faster and more potent the Steam Deck should be. With Valve's Steam Deck now officially unveiled, including all the major core specifications, it's surprising just how much there is that we still don't know.
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