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A single developer has remade Call of Duty 2's Carentan level with photo-scanned models, ray tracing and more

Will checks out RTX Remix winners at Gamescom - including a sterling upgrade of Call of Duty 2's Carentan level, plus Painkiller and Vampire: The Masquerade.

As well as boosting its GeForce Now cloud streaming with PS5 Pro-beating hardware and new peripheral options, Nvidia has also detailed some of its recent RTX Remix successes at Gamescom 2025. If you're not familiar, RTX Remix is a set of tools for remastering old games with modern graphics techniques, converting ancient engines to support ray-traced lighting, shadow and reflections, new particular effects, higher-quality materials and so on. The ones I saw were Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which uses more of a "use AI to upscale everything, then hand-make the really important stuff" approach, which manages to convincingly recreate the atmospheric feel of the game while ensuring the entire thing looks at least OK. Painkiller, by contrast, went for a more selective approach, with the developer creating full 3D replacements for what were previously flat textures or static objects, allowing for swinging torches that splash light around the room as they are shot into motion, and intricate ceiling supports that cast complex shadows to produce real depth.

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