Nubia RedMagic 8 Pro is no ordinary gaming phone
The RedMagic 8 Pro. Picture: Nubia.
Gaming phones are a niche market and up to now, a great gaming phone meant lots of gamer features that make it difficult to use as a daily driver. I loved using Nubia’s RedMagic 7 Pro for its stunning performance and gamer looks, but with their new RedMagic 8 Pro, you get a stylish handset that also doubles as a powerful mobile gaming device.
The ongoing design trend for smartphones is to have large rounded corners and bevelled edges. The RedMagic 8 Pro throws that design aesthetic out the window and replaces it with a more stylish and practical approach that maximises the screen area by using tiny rounded corners. The sides and front glass are flat which I love. The second generation of the under-display selfie camera is incognito and located at the top and centre. This creates a stunning display that isn't interrupted by a cutout of any kind although, under certain lighting conditions you will see a tiny faint circle where the camera is located — you won’t see it unless you look for it. The display has a 93.7% screen-to-body ratio and is protected by Gorilla Glass 5.
The phone also features an optical under-display fingerprint reader that works fast and reliably. Its placement towards the bottom of the display makes it easy to reach one-handed.
Around the back is a mostly matte black textured finish that exudes style with stencilled areas that expose the polished logos and writing. Along the long edge of the left side are the RedMagic name with diagonal dashes on either side and these ‘light strips’ have settings that can be configured to light up under certain circumstances and with different effects and colours. I didn’t realise it was there until I started to go through all the features in the settings. It’s really cool if you’re into RGB lighting, but if not, then you can turn it off and have the back look like a normal phone.
The three rear cameras and flash are vertically stacked at the top and centre. The camera lenses are raised on what is otherwise a flat back.
There are two variants of the RedMagic 8 Pro — Matte Black and Void. The latter has a transparent back and you can see a fan with its RGB lights and other parts of the insides. I received the Matte Black version for this review, which is a little more understated.
True to Nubia gaming phones of the past is the dedicated red ‘Game Space Centre’ button on the right. This acts as a shortcut to bring you right to the Nubia games hub where you’ll see all your installed games and options to charge game-specific options.
I know Nubia offers gaming accessories, but I already had a GameSir X2 Pro controller and it matches the style, colour and size of the RedMagic 8 Pro, perfectly. However, if you prefer to use the phone without an extra controller there are top-rate 520Hz capacitive-touch shoulder triggers, which can be configured to activate on-screen controls.
The 8 Pro also features Nubia’s ICE 11 cooling system with a composite graphene vapour chamber heat dissipation plate and a high-speed turbofan that draws the heat away from the internals and out through vents on the left and right edges.
Lastly, the phone features dual stereo speakers on the top and bottom edges along with a 3.5mm headphone jack located on the top right edge.
The 6.8-inch AMOLED has a 2480px x 1116px resolution and a 20:9 aspect ratio. It has a refresh rate of 120Hz and a 960Hz touch sampling rate. The refresh rate has three options — 60Hz, 90Hz and 120Hz. It’s not often you see a 90Hz option, but it’s great for those who want a fast refresh rate for smoothness as well as good battery life.
There’s no getting away from the fact that under-display cameras don’t offer great image quality, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to accept to get such a stunning, truly full-screen display.
The display looks great and has lots of colour options under the display settings. It can also get bright enough to easily see outdoors and is good for HDR video content with a peak brightness of 1300 nits.
The stereo loudspeakers, which deliver outstanding clarity, volume and a wide soundstage, are also notable. The phone supports DTS: X Ultra that tweaks and improves the sound quality as well as surround sound effects. There’s a decent amount of bass for a mobile device and the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack means you can go retro without a dongle. Of course, wired headphones provide the best latency performance although good Bluetooth headphones are getting better.
The Nubia RedMagic 8 Pro is the first phone this year I’ve tested with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It will be available in two variants — 12GB / 16GB (LPDDR5X) and 256GB / 512GB UFS 4.0 storage. Sadly, there’s no microSD card support although the SIM tray supports dual nano SIMs.
The RedMagic 7 Pro featured 5000mAh, which some were not happy with but despite the 8 Pro being 7g lighter, it packs a 6000mAh dual-cell battery into its 9.47mm thick body.
Nubia says the included 65W GaN fast-charging brick is able to charge the 8 Pro in 43 minutes.
To test performance I ran a lot of benchmarks including 3DMark and Geekbench 5. Even very powerful phones like the iPhone 14 Pro Max suffer from thermal limiting and I saw its scores drop during the Wild Life Stress test from 3362 to 2199 with a resulting stability score of 65.4%. By contrast, the RedMagic 8 Pro scored 3,689 for its best loop and 3,653 for the lowest with 99% stability. This is the best score on an Android phone I’ve ever recorded and It’s thanks to the efficiency of the ICE 11 cooling system which keeps the temperatures of the CPU and GPU low.
Geekbench 5 scores were also impressive with a single-core score of 1495 and a multi-core score of 5238.
Of course, synthetic benchmarks are great but where it really matters, the RedMagic 8 Pro delivers. I played several games extensively and all of them performed flawlessly. While it’s not my favourite game, I played a lot of Genshin Impact as it really tests the hardware of any phone. I was able to play it for long periods with maximum graphic settings without it dropping below 60fps.
Other games like Ashphalts Legends, Call of Duty Mobile, PUBG Mobile and Real Racing 3 offered the same silky smooth gaming experience. Despite all the heat dissipation, I never felt the phone getting hot even while using the included transparent plastic case. I also ran emulation software (AetherSX2) with no issues, just glorious retro gaming at double the resolution of the original games.
Thanks to fast charging the 8 Pro is quick to refill, but the 6000mAh battery also helps to keep you going for a day or even two. Of course, playing games will drain the battery faster, but the combination of the 8 Gen 2 chipset and optimisations in Android 13 makes it a battery champ.
Charge separation is an option under the battery setting that when enabled, will only allow the power coming from the charger to power the phone — it won’t charge the battery. This is to reduce additional heat generated by charging the battery. It should also help to extend the lifespan of your battery if you like to play a lot of games with your phone plugged in. By default, the fan turns on while charging to keep the battery temps down — a good feature to further extend the life of your battery. Unfortunately, there's no wireless charging.
The RedMagic Pro 8 features a triple rear camera system that includes a 50MP main shooter f/1.88, (wide) with phase detect autofocus, an 8MP, f/2.2, 120Ëš, 13mm (ultrawide),
1/4.0", 1.12μm and a 2 MP, f/2.4, (macro). The selfie camera has a 16MP sensor and produces results that are fine in good light but lack detail, contrast and colour.
The main camera is good and works well under good lighting. I found it produced excellent night shots too.
Video capture is possible up to 8K if that’s something you’re interested in. The 8MP ultrawide camera isn’t as good as the main camera but is capable of capturing good photos and video.
The 2MP macro camera is too low a resolution to be much good, but it does have a unique focus-peaking feature that magnifies a tiny portion of the image to help get your subject in focus.
The camera app is jam-packed with features and a special ‘Camera-friendly’ mode that has 24 different fun modes to play with.
The RedMagic 8 Pro is a beast of a phone with tons of power under the hood and its sleek and stylish looks don’t scream that this is a gamer-centric phone. I’m a huge fan of the design aesthetic and would be happy to use it as my everyday phone. It offers exceptional gaming features and it also blazes through everything else with ease.
The Nubia RedMagic 8 Pro launches on February 2. RedMagic
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