NVIDIA RTX Remix Mod Contest winners include path-traced Painkiller, Call of Duty, and more

The NVIDIA and ModDB RTX Remix Mod Contest has wrapped, and the winners have been announced at Gamescom 2025. For those that need a refresher, NVIDIA's RTX Remix is like sorcery for the PC gaming and modding community, as it opens the door to remastering classic games with updated assets, remastered textures, physically-based material, and full path-traced lighting. It's what makes Half-Life 2 RTX and NVIDIA's own Portal with RTX possible, and there are now over 350 active RTX Remix projects in development, with 100 mods released so far.

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To be eligible for an award and a slice of the $50,000 prize pool, any RTX Remix Mod Contest submission needed to offer a playable slice or demo that took advantage of RTX Remix's features. The impressive Painkiller RTX Remix mod, by Binq_Adams, not only won the top Best Overall RTX Mod award, but it also earned the Best Use of RTX in a Mod and Most Complete RTX Mod awards.

Painkiller, a fast-paced first-person shooter from developer People Can Fly, was first released in 2004 on PC. With old-school Doom and Serious Sam-style gameplay that sees you taking down hordes of monsters, Painkiller has become a cult favorite among PC gamers, and this RTX Remix mod and remaster sports modern ray-traced visuals with DLSS support.

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The attention to detail here is impressive, as not only is the game given a modern facelift with enhanced textures, models, and ray-traced lighting, but the team spent time researching developer People Can Fly's various inspirations for Painkiller's art direction so that its updated and overhauled visuals remained faithful to the original.

Runner-up in the Best Use of RTX category was the early in development but already impressive Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - RTX Remaster by Safemilk, with the runner-up in the Most Complete RTX Mod category going to I-Ninja Remixed, by g.i.george333. The latter is a vibrant cartoony 3D platformer that comes alive with newly implemented path-traced lighting.

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And for those that played the technically flawed but brilliant Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines back in the day, you'll want to keep tabs on this mod as it's remastering every little thing from the base game, right down to turning a gumball machine texture into a convenient store into a highly detailed physically-based model with individually rendered ray-traced gumballs. This is a game about vampires, by the way.

Rounding out the award winners is the Community Choice RTX Mod Winner, Call of Duty 2 RTX Remix of Carentan, by tadpole3159. This one is both fascinating and impressive, as it recreates one of the most iconic maps from Call of Duty 2 with an attention to detail and realism that not only incorporates the most advanced rendering and gaming technologies available today, from path tracing to DLSS 4, but it features assets modeled with new high-resolution photography of actual guns and other objects captured at museums.

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RTX Remix is set to get another update in September, one that will add a particle system that will bring path-traced particles to over 165 classic games for the first time.