Survival horror 'Confronted' upgrades to UE 5.8.4, earns Steam Deck Verified status

Indie survival horror title Confronted has received a major engine upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.8.4 alongside substantial performance optimizations that have earned it Steam Deck Verified status for the first time since its 2024 Early Access launch. The update removes the previous requirement to use Performance Mode for playable frame rates, allowing the game to maintain a stable 30 FPS on Steam Deck at low settings without any upscaling, while also keeping VRAM usage low enough to accommodate higher texture quality settings.

For players seeking smoother gameplay, the revised Performance Mode now delivers 40-50 FPS and occasionally reaches 60 FPS, representing a 20-50% improvement over the baseline. The developers replaced FSR with TSR (Temporal Super Resolution), which addresses aliasing issues common in Unreal Engine titles, and introduced Lumen Lite, a lighter variant of Unreal Engine's dynamic global illumination system that preserves visual quality while reducing computational overhead.

Engine and rendering changes in the Confronted update

• Unreal Engine 5.8.4 migration: The game engine has been updated from an earlier UE5 version to 5.8.4, which will be the release version at full launch, bringing general performance improvements of approximately 10% across all hardware configurations.
• TSR replacing FSR: Performance Mode now uses Unreal Engine's native Temporal Super Resolution instead of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, specifically to resolve aliasing artifacts that frequently affect Unreal Engine titles and to provide more stable upscaling behavior.
• Lumen Lite integration: The optimized Performance Mode enables a reduced variant of Unreal Engine's Lumen dynamic global illumination system, maintaining lighting effects while significantly reducing GPU load compared to full Lumen.
• Performance Mode efficiency: The optimized path now operates up to 50% more efficiently than the previous implementation, boosting frame rates from a stable 30 FPS baseline to 40-50 FPS with peaks at 60 FPS on Steam Deck hardware.
• Baseline playability without upscaling: The update achieves playable performance at low settings without requiring any upscaling technology, freeing VRAM capacity that allows users to increase texture quality beyond the minimum preset.

Why it matters

This update demonstrates how Unreal Engine 5.8.4's built-in scalability features, particularly TSR and tiered Lumen configurations, can enable smaller studios to achieve Steam Deck Verified status without extensive custom optimization work. For the Linux gaming ecosystem, the shift from FSR to TSR as the default upscaling path in an indie title provides a useful data point on developer preferences within Unreal Engine's integrated toolchain, while the 30 FPS baseline without upscaling establishes a clearer performance floor for Steam Deck compatibility testing.