But the Steam Deck has a secret weapon – it plays games at a relatively low 1,280x800-pixel resolution. This is a handheld gaming device that's around $500, so you're not going to get the same raw performance as a $1,000-or-more gaming PC. GPU: eight RDNA 2 compute units, 1.0-1.6GHz.CPU: Zen 2 four-core/eight-thread, 2.4-3.5GHz.It's not dissimilar to what the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X use, and AMD makes the chips for those living-room consoles as well. It's been alternatively called the Van Gogh or Aerith chip. Yes, that's a lot of three-letter abbreviations. The Steam Deck is powered by a custom AMD APU, which is a system on a chip, or SoC, that combines CPU and GPU functions. There's a real challenge in taking something as compact as the Steam Deck and outfitting it to compete with full-size gaming laptops or even living room consoles.

That's an area where traditional gaming PCs, which can easily add multiple terabytes of extra storage, have a clear advantage. It's not an issue unique to the Steam Deck, and every game console from the PS5 to the Switch really needs add-on storage these days. However, that card also got filled up quickly, so I ended up swapping games in and out frequently. There is a microSD card slot built in, again much like on the Nintendo Switch, and I added a 256GB card with no problem. It doesn't help that so many games that I was interested in trying – Baldur's Gate 3, GTA 5, Doom Eternal – are north of 70GB and sometimes over 100GB in size. I've been testing the 256GB version (as opposed to the 64GB and 512GB versions), and trust me, that storage fills up fast.

Storage space in the Steam Deck fills up quickly.

Steam handheld