$50,000 RTX Remix Mod Contest Winners Revealed: Download & Play The RTX Mods Today

Many classic PC games remain beloved for their unforgettable stories, characters, and gameplay. But as technology advances, their visuals struggle to keep up, making it harder for the original gamers who played them, or new generations, to appreciate their magic.

NVIDIA RTX Remix, a modding platform for RTX AI PCs, was built to change that. By reimagining the graphics of these timeless classics with cutting-edge path tracing, we’re bridging the past and the future, allowing longtime fans to relive their favorite adventures in stunning detail, while introducing a new wave of players to the games that defined an era.

Since its initial release, the RTX Remix modding community has grown to over 237 active projects, with over 100 RTX Remix mods released. They span a catalog of beloved games like Half-Life 2, Need for Speed Underground, Portal 2 and Deus Ex, boasting over 2 million downloads.

Several months ago, we invited modders to participate in the NVIDIA and ModDB RTX Remix Mod Contest. $50,000 in cash prizes were on offer for modders or teams who developed new mods, or updated existing releases, with the cash split between four categories - three voted for by ModDB and NVIDIA, and one by the community.

24 mods were submitted for consideration, and today we can reveal the winners:

Thanks to all of the modders for their great work; download their RTX Remix mods from ModDB’s contest page; many others can be grabbed from ModDB’s dedicated RTX Remix page. 

Judging Criteria: The mod that demonstrates the best overall effort using RTX Remix, featuring fantastic textures, RTX lighting, and volumetrics, while also providing an excellent playable experience.

Winner: Painkiller RTX Remix, by Merry Pencil Studios, composed of modders Binq_Adams, McGillacutty, XDavidXtreme, and PseudoPolish

Our judges loved Painkiller RTX Remix's stunning asset work, featuring new PBR materials, geometry, and high-poly displacement maps, enabling the path-traced lighting to naturally illuminate every surface. NPCs were remastered, and when defeated, leave behind glowing powerups that light the environment. And some materials, like marble, were crafted with sub-surface scattering, making the interplay between lights, volumetrics, and materials incredibly lifelike.

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Enormous attention was taken to revamp environments to take advantage of dynamic lighting. For example, in a church, lanterns were modded to have real physics, and have intricate meshes that cast real-time shadows–when you fire an explosive, they swing around bathing the scene in intricate light and shadows. Plus, projectiles, exploding barrels, and particles all emit light in the environment, supported by artistic vision and robust engine-level improvements. 

Painkiller RTX Remix is remastered with a combination of AI-generated materials and hand crafted hero assets, resulting in a thorough overhaul of the game – as development progresses it should only get better.

Being a complete experience, with fantastic use of lighting and effects, and high quality models and textures, Painkiller RTX Remix won the $20,000 cash grand prize and 6 months of GeForce NOW Ultimate.

Judging Criteria: The mod that best utilizes RTX Remix to realistically affect scenes. Show off atmospheric fog, smoke, dynamic lighting, shadows, particles, RTX Skin, etc to create an incredible visual experience.

Winner: Painkiller RTX Remix, by Merry Pencil Studios

Painkiller RTX Remix wowed the judges with its many RTX effects. Assets make great use of parallax occlusion mapping and remodeled geometry, which in combination with the path tracing, causes cracks and other blemishes to self shadow, giving the materials a real history and place in the scene.

Statues and some enemies have subsurface scattering via RTX Skin technology, and they glow as light transmits and propagates through them. Empty abandoned churches feel magical with RTX Volumetrics– before a tense fight is about to unfold, there’s nothing like peering at a stained glass window that has a volumetric beam of light pouring through it, complete with dust particles suspended within it. And the lighting here is tuned to evoke the tone of the original, while bringing something new to the feel of the game.

From end to end, Painkiller RTX Remix takes full advantage of path tracing and RTX technologies, making it the clear winner for the ‘Best Use of RTX’ category. The mod team behind Painkiller Remixed, Merry Pencil Studios, will receive a $10,000 cash prize. Congratulations!

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There were also other excellent submissions, so we expanded the prize pool for the contest and selected a runner-up, who will receive a $5,000 cash prize, as well as 6 months of GeForce NOW Ultimate.

Runner-Up: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines - RTX Remaster, by Safemilk

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines - RTX Remaster features excellent asset quality with new materials and a significant amount of replacement assets. Our judges loved the nightclub scene, calling it one of the best path-traced shadow demos in years.

Textures have been extensively updated with PBR materials, giving a higher quality appearance, while retaining the artistic style. Lighting has been significantly reworked and improved, and the use of fog and atmospheric effects is good.

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The diner was the best location demonstrated, with shadows, reflections, and textures yielding great results. Some objects go from flat textures to being fully modeled with incredible detail. Overall the judges loved this entry so much they awarded it a 2nd place runner up in the ‘Best Use of RTX’ in a mod category.

Judging Criteria: The most fully playable remaster, with multiple levels or the entire game modded, showcasing the power of RTX Remix.

Winner: Painkiller RTX Remix, by Merry Pencil Studios

Painkiller RTX Remix was the whole package, with over 35 remastered levels in the game. Merry Pencil Studios netted another $10,000 cash prize, for a total of $40,000 cash in winnings for their fantastic work on Painkiller RTX Remix.

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And once again, the submissions were so good, we expanded the prize pool by adding another $5,000 runner-up and 6 months of GeForce NOW Ultimate.

Runner-Up: I-Ninja Remixed, by g.i.george333

I-Ninja, the 2003 cult-classic platformer from Argonaut Games, is a colorful platformer from the past that was primarily played on the PlayStation 2, before being released on PC exclusively in Europe a year later. g.i.george333 has remastered this little-known release in I-Ninja Remixed, updating over 2,000 textures with PBR materials and adding new lighting throughout the game.

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For over a decade, path tracing has been a staple of animated movies, but rare in cartoony games. It feels novel and wonderful to see path tracing illuminate the vivid and fantastical environments of I-Ninja Remixed.

From the reflective deep blue waters of Jungle Falls, to the purple sunsets of Bomb Bay, there were many locales the judges relished visiting as they played I-Ninja Remixed. The amount of remastered content here must be seen, with revamped assets and lighting applied to nearly the entirety of the game, giving g.i.george333’s mod the nod over other entrants in this category.

Our final category was open to ModDB users and the broader community, simply asking them to select their favorite RTX Remix mod submitted to the contest.

And the winner is…

Call of Duty 2 RTX Remix of Carentan, by tadpole3159

Call of Duty 2’s multiplayer mode was at one time the most popular online shooter, and fans to this day are still playing it on PC using community-made master servers and mods. tadpole3159, a lead artist at an acclaimed British game development studio, aims to completely remaster Call of Duty 2’s multiplayer mode, beginning with its classic Carentan map.

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Scenery has been replaced and upgraded, adding additional geometric detail where once flat angled textured surfaces represented debris, and tadpole3159 intends to fill each building’s barren rooms with period-accurate furniture and objects, making them appear lived in and more realistic.

To further enhance the level, a full day-night cycle with dynamic lighting has been introduced, enabling night battles illuminated primarily by player combat and the occasional street lamp. Interiors are illuminated by the sun and moon and lamps casting accurate lighting. And textures and surfaces have been remade with additional geometric detail, physically-based materials and Parallax Occlusion Mapping, enabling accurate interplay with all light sources, and allowing water bodies to reflect their surroundings.

Player characters are similarly enhanced, though tadpole3159 is going one step further by photo scanning real World War 2 combat clothing and artifacts, and putting them into the game via a process called photogrammetry. Thanks to RTX Remix, tadpole3159 was able to add all of these elements into the game without compromising on their geometric detail, or their 8K resolution textures.

For his efforts, tadpole3159 has won the community-voted $10,000 cash prize, and 6 months of GeForce NOW Ultimate - congratulations!

Each of the mods submitted to the RTX Remix Modding Contest are available to download now from ModDB. Even more can be downloaded here, and on the RTX Remix Showcase Discord server many modders demonstrate and share work in progress builds.

In RTX Remix, legacy particles from a classic game could be interpreted as path-traced, enabling them to cast realistic light, enhancing the appearance of many scenes. But ultimately, these particles were still over 20 years old, lacking detail, flair, and fluid animations.

In a new update in September, modders will be able to create brand new particles in Remix that match the look of those found in modern titles. This opens the door for over 165 RTX Remix compatible games to have particles for the first time, and we can’t wait to see all the ways modders dazzle gamers with realistic fire and fantastical effects.

Because these particles are path-traced, they cast accurate shadows and are reflected in the world. They even realistically collide with the geometry in the environment.

The RTX Remix team has worked to give modders the kind of control professional studio artists are used to, offering the ability to tune the look of particles, their physics simulation, and even their turbulence. 

Here’s a demo of the capabilities of Remix’s particle system, using a modified high energy pellet from Portal with RTX - see how the high energy pellets fly around the world, showering sparks that collide off every surface, reflecting in the world around the player.

The only limitation to RTX Remix’s path-traced particle is your imagination! Stay tuned for the RTX Remix particle system’s release in September.

To make your own RTX mods, download NVIDIA RTX Remix from the Home screen of NVIDIA app. And grab the Half-Life 2 RTX demo or Portal with RTX from Steam for an example of what’s possible with RTX Remix.

Leveraging Remix’s open source repositories, RTX Remix community members continue to make Remix modding easier and more powerful, having recently created an Adobe Substance plugin to quickly import and export assets, a tool to automatically generate emissive maps, as well as expanding RTX Remix title compatibility to over 165 games.

NVIDIA RTX Remix, a NVIDIA Studio tool, requires a GeForce RTX GPU to create RTX Remix Mods, while mods and games built using Remix are compatible with any hardware that can run Vulkan ray-traced games.

For news about future RTX Remix enhancements, new RTX games, RTX technologies, drivers, NVIDIA software, and more, return to GeForce.com regularly.