nubia Red Magic 9 Pro review

Introduction and specs

The Red Magic 9 Pro by nubia has arrived early this year, probably due to Qualcomm making its top-tier chipset available earlier than usual. Either way, this year’s top-tier gaming smartphone from Red Magic is out, and it comes along with a slew of meaningful upgrades. A worthy generational improvement.

In addition to the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC on board, the handset boasts a brighter display, twice the standard storage, a new 50MP ultrawide camera, a bigger battery, and the global variant finally gets USB 3.2 Gen2.

ZTE nubia Red Magic 9 Pro specs at a glance:

• Body: 164.0×76.4×8.9mm, 229g; Glass front (Gorilla Glass 5), aluminum frame, glass back; Pressure sensitive zones (520Hz touch-sensing), Built-in cooling fan, Aviation aluminum middle frame.
• Display: 6.80″ AMOLED, 1B colors, 120Hz, 1600 nits (peak), 1116x2480px resolution, 20:9 aspect ratio, 400ppi.
• Chipset: Qualcomm SM8650-AB Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (4 nm): Octa-core (1×3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 & 5×3.2 GHz Cortex-A720 & 2×2.3 GHz Cortex-A520); Adreno 750.
• Memory: 256GB 12GB RAM, 512GB 16GB RAM, UFS 4.0.
• OS/Software: Android 14, Redmagic OS 9.
• Rear camera:Wide (main): 50 MP, 1/1.57″, 1.0µm, PDAF, OIS; Ultra wide angle: 50 MP, f/2.2, 1/2.76″, 0.64µm; Macro: 2 MP, f/2.4.
• Front camera: 16 MP, f/2.0, (wide), 1.12µm, under display.
• Video capture:Rear camera: 8K@30fps, 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30/60/120/240fps; Front camera: 1080p@30/60fps.
• Battery: 6500mAh; 80W wired, PD3.0.
• Connectivity: 5G; Dual SIM; Wi-Fi 7; BT 5.3; NFC; Infrared port; 3.5mm jack; IR blaster, USB 3. Gen2.
• Misc: Fingerprint reader (under display, optical); stereo speakers.

To handle the powerful chip, nubia has once again upgraded the cooling solution, now called ICE 13. It incorporates a 10-layer heat dissipation sheet with a bigger surface, and the cooling fan now goes up to 22,000 RPM while reducing noise emissions.

The handset also boasts upgrades to the stereo speaker setup, more gaming features, better LED lighting around, including the shoulder triggers, and a slimmer design. That last bit is impressive, given the 500 mAh battery increase over the last generation.

So, without further ado, let’s see how the new Red Magic 9 Pro runs games and how well it fares in our usual set of tests.

Unboxing the nubia Red Magic 9 Pro

The handset comes in a standard box containing the usual user manuals along with a USB-A to USB-C cable for charging and data transfer and a 65W wall charger.

Nubia provides a protective case too. It’s transparent, so it doesn’t take away from the nice design.

Design and ergonomics

The Red Magic 9 Pro comes with a newly designed chassis, one that’s a blend between the 8/8S Pro and the 7/7S Pro. It has the blocky structure of the 8 Pro, but the back is once again glass with elements suggesting the glass is transparent.

We are not going to lie, we liked how the slab of metal felt and looked like in the last two generations. It gave the 8 Pro/8S Pro that distinctive look and we believe many users liked it too.

Having said that, the 9 Pro still looks and feels pretty premium. The glass back is likely just regular glass, as nubia doesn’t mention Corning or any other reputable brand. The handset comes in Black, Black/Transparent and Silver variants and we obviously have the Black/Transparent one. It’s not entirely transparent, though, but the screws and the entire plate put together a transparent-like, industrial look.

The best thing about the new design is probably the camera module. It’s completely flush and sits behind the glass panel, so the back of the device is almost perfectly flat. There’s just a small protrusion of the LED flash, which elevates the camera island area just a little so it doesn’t scratch when placing the handset on its back. Clever! Moreover, nubia moved the cameras from the center to the upper-left corner. Keep in mind that the bottom ring is actually an LED strip around the cooling fan, which you can see through the glass.

Not many things light up – just the aforementioned LED ring around the cooling fan, the “generation 09” inscription next to the camera island and the shoulder triggers on the side frame.

Speaking of, nubia says it’s aviation-grade aluminum. It feels quite nice and the sharp edges are smooth enough to the touch. The two glass sheets meet the side frame without forming any awkward ridges. The phone is really well built.

The right side of the frame is a bit overcrowded as it holds not just the touch-sensitive shoulder triggers, but also the hardware switch for the Gaming Space Center, the power button and the volume rocker.

The power button is now round, sits pretty close to the bottom and the volume rocker naturally falls under the thumb, so it takes some time to get used to not pressing the volume key. We like the circular design of the power button, though, as it makes it easier to distinguish when reaching for it.

Two vent openings for the cooling fan sit across each other on the side frame, you can see some of the LEDs shining through the grilles.

The bottom houses the SIM card tray, USB-C connector and the loudspeaker grille. The top holds the 3.5mm audio jack, the second speaker grille, and, interestingly enough, an IR blaster.

Going around the frame, we noticed three microphones. That’s because you will cover the bottom microphone with your hand when in landscape orientation. The additional microphone is located on the right side of the frame, just below the Game Space switch.

The front is business as usual. A 6.8-inch full-screen display sits behind an unnamed glass sheet. It’s surrounded by thin and symmetrical bezels while the selfie camera is once again under the display. This tech has advanced enough to make it virtually impossible to spot.

While we like the design and the ergonomics are pretty nice for gaming purposes, there’s no denying that the 9 Pro is a big and hefty device. It weighs in at 229 grams and is nearly 9mm thick. But with all that hardware, cooling and an impressive 6,500 mAh battery, it’s no surprise.

As before, the main drawback is the lack of ingress protection, though this is also understandable given the active cooling system.

Unobstructed 6.8-inch OLED display

On the surface, the nubia Red Magic 8S Pro and the 9 Pro share the same 6.8-inch OLED display with 120Hz refresh rate and 10-bit color depth. However, nubia advertises a higher peak brightness of 1,600 nits (from 1,300 nits), saying it’s BOE’s Q9+ OLED panel. The resolution remains the same – 1116 x 2480px, which is a gaming-friendly resolution as it will make it easier for the GPU to render.

Unfortunately, there’s still no HDR video support, which is a considerable drawback given that even some midrangers offer the Dolby Vision standard or HDR10+ at the very least. The good news is that the HDR works in the YouTube app.

In our usual set of tests, the panel turned out to be slightly better than the previous generation. We got up to 603 nits in manual mode, while in auto mode, the panel peaked at 1,016 nits. That’s not nearly enough to compete with the best displays out there and some similarly priced handsets, and it’s far from the advertised 1,600 nits.

Still, anything above 1,000 nits should be more than enough for comfortable outdoor use, even on a bright sunny day. Maybe not for gaming, but for browsing, reading, chatting, etc.

On a more positive note, the UD selfie camera is excellently implemented, and it’s impossible to spot the lens when the screen is on. The display really is full-screen.

High refresh rate handling

The device offers four modes in total – 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz and Auto. The first three serve as a cap to the refresh rate, while the latter leaves the system to decide the appropriate refresh rate given the current scenario. The adjustment is pretty straightforward, though. The system will always go for the maximum refresh rate, be it system or third-party apps and system menus. Leaving the phone alone for a couple of seconds will reduce the refresh rate to 60Hz to preserve power. Running full-screen videos does the same as you don’t really need 120Hz to watch a 24, 30 or 60fps video.

Battery life

The new Red Magic 9 Pro sports a bigger 6,500 mAh battery and presumably more efficient Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, compared to its predecessors. And the battery endurance shows.

We found the screen-on results to be excellent. The web browsing score is slightly lower than expected, but the video streaming and especially the gaming test show impressive runtimes. And with the handset performing great in all scenarios, the Active Use Score is respectable as well.

const BATTERY_TEST_PHONE_V2 = [12709, 12691, 11893, 12223];

Charging speed

Unlike its predecessors, the global version of the Red Magic 9 Pro supports 80W fast charging via the Power Delivery 3.0 protocol. Using the device’s included charger in the retail box, we got similar readings to the 65W charging on the Red Magic 8S Pro. In fact, the 9 Pro seems to charge slightly slower.

However, we need to consider the fact that the two handsets carry different batteries, with different capacities.

Still, the device offers more than decent enough fast charging, and you can top off the battery in just over 40 minutes. That’s plenty competitive.

Speakers

The Red Magic 9 Pro is marketed with an improved set of stereo speakers with a large sound cavity and DTS: XULTRA sound tuning. The speakers are placed on each side when holding the phone horizontally and achieve an impressive -24.8 LUFS loudness.

But the speakers aren’t just loud – they also offer excellent sound quality. The bass is deep, the highs are crisp, and the vocals are clear. There’s minimal to barely noticeable distortion at higher levels, but as always, the sound quality is excellent.

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Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal “0db” flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.

Redmagic OS 9 on top of Android 14

The nubia Red Magic 9 Pro naturally comes with the latest available Redmagic OS software, in this case, version 9. This version is based on Android 14 and brings a couple of new features, but mostly under-the-hood changes.

Keeping up with the trends, the company developed the new OS overlay with AI in mind. Nubia markets a new AI algorithm working in the background to identify games, provide useful information during gameplay, enhances the AI voice assistant functionality and helps make the underlying processes more efficient within the system.

But for all intents and purposes, the UI, navigation, iconography and animations are largely the same as before, with some small visual changes to the icons in the Settings menu. The UI overhaul came with the Red Magic 8 Pro, so Redmagic OS is now more in line with stock Android and is simpler-looking, in a good way. There are still tons of features and customizations to go through and it’s still heavily customized ROM, not your typical vanilla Android.

Pretty much every aspect of the UI is customizable and can be tuned to your liking. It has tons of customizable clock styles for the lock screen, themes, icon adjustments, etc. Now, you can even choose the shape and the accent color of the quick toggles in the notification shade menu.

ZTE phones have always had special attention to their Always-on display functionality. You can even set looping, cool-looking GIFs and videos. Naturally, this would consume more power.

The rather subtle LED lighting on the back can also be customized to your liking.

One of the new Redmagic OS features is the ability to adjust volume on per app basis, so you can listen to music while playing games.

The fingerprint reader works as well as ever. It’s fast, reliable and accurate. It also doubles as a heart rate monitor. It can be surprisingly accurate but is a bit inconsistent for our taste.

Game Space and screen casting

The Game space in-game overlay has experienced a major redesign with Redmagic OS 6. It now consists of two large, symmetrical menus on each side of the display. Most of the functions are readily accessible with a single tap, which is greatly appreciated. You can monitor your CPU and GPU frequency as well as, crucially, in-game fps using an overlay. There are some quick access shortcuts for supported messenger apps as well for more convenient window-based chatting while in game.

Most of the interesting and powerful settings are located in their own sub-menu within the overlay. You can adjust CPU and GPU performance profiles, screen sensitivity and sampling rate, and enable a particular visual profile for the display to make certain game elements more easily visible.

Game Shorthand is a feature within Game Space; it is basically a library where you can store game screenshots and attach notes to them. You can then quickly view up to 50 of these at a time – great for things like point-and-click adventure games for remembering clues and puzzles.

Plugins are a relatively new addition to the Red Magic Game Space. Unfortunately, like many other parts of the UI, these suffer from poor and incomplete translations, and it is somewhat difficult to discern what each one does.

X Gravity is the system nubia uses for mapping external devices like a controller or keyboard and mouse to on-screen controls. This is something that the Red Magic 8S Pro lets you easily do out of the box, which might be considered a bit controversial for competitive play since it offers a major advantage.

Auxiliary line is a way to define on-screen circles that appear around your character and signify things like the area of effect of certain skills or attacks – particularly useful for MOBA games. Stopwatches give the player an array of on-screen stopwatches to quickly time things like a skill or spell cooldown on enemies.

The Crosshair feature is particularly useful for shooters. Not only does it draw a crosshair overlay on the screen, but it can also zoom into a particular area of the image.

A new addition to the plugin library is the so-called AI Trigger. The system waits for a certain event to happen, say empty magazine, and it will automatically tap on the reload button.

Of course, there are the shoulder triggers – one of the best gaming features of the Red Magic 9 Pro by far. They provide a really nice experience for racing and first-person shooter games.

Circling back to X Gravity and the ability to map in-game, on-screen controls to physical accessories like a joystick or keyboard and mouse, it should be considered how major of a feature this is on the Red Magic 9 Pro. The phone itself offers several convenient ways to connect to peripherals. First off, there is USB alt mode. Using a supported dongle, you can easily get an HDMI or DP output out of the Red Magic 9 Pro and USB inputs back into the phone. This is a great way to connect it directly to a monitor or TV.

If that seems too cumbersome for you and you would rather just use a PC to play your mobile games, then there is Redmagic studio – a Windows app that lets you screencast over Wi-Fi or USB cable connected directly to the PC. It works at a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. The whole pairing process with the desktop app is seamless and extremely easy. You can set up different mapping profiles for all the games you play, and the keyboard/mouse input is pretty solid.

The streaming feature works in all menus of the phone and apps, not just games so it may come in handy for more than just gaming. The gestures and keyboard typing feel native. You can even use the phone itself as a trackpad for touch input or alternatively opt to have it entirely autonomously functional so you can cast one app to a TV or monitor while using your phone for something entirely different. The whole system is extremely flexible and works surprisingly well. Props to nubia.

The handset can also be used as a touchpad or just use the app for screen casting.

In terms of under-the-hood gaming-related features, the Red Magic 8 Pro has a dedicated secondary “gaming” chip called the Red Core 2. It is primarily meant to handle things like audio and haptic feedback processing and RGB lighting control so that these tasks can be offloaded from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 main chipset for better performance.

Speaking of haptics, the 9 Pro is by far the best in its family line in this regard. The haptic motor is extremely crisp, precise and feels nice. No complaints there. It boasts 38% increased vibration intensity compared to its precessor.

The Red Magic 9 Pro also does something nubia calls quintuple buffering for generated game frames using a system called “MAGIC GPU”. The idea here is that different systems like screen recording or casting might want to access GPU frames concurrently and, without sufficient buffering, might interfere with the frame count that actually ends up on display. This system prioritized display frames before anything else.

Synthetic benchmarks

The Red Magic 9 Pro isn’t the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered smartphone coming to our office, so we know what to expect. It’s marketed to offer 30% performance gains while being 20% more efficient than its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It’s still based on the 4nm manufacturing process from TSMC.

The eight-core processor inside is highlighted by 1x Cortex-X4 prime core running up to 3.3 GHz, 5x performance Cortex-A720 based cores at up to 3.2 GHz, and 2x efficiency Cortex-A520 based cores clocked up to 2.3 GHz. It is a four-cluster processor with 1+3+2+2 structure.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and its new Adreno 750 GPU can deliver ‘console-defying’ gaming with 240 fps support on 240 Hz displays. Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 can generate frames for smoother playback, and there’s Unreal Engine 5.2 support. The GPU is 25% faster, 25% more power efficient, and brings 40% better Ray Tracing compared to the Adreno 740 inside the SD8G2.

AI is front and center in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It all starts with the AI Engine, which supports multi-modal generative AI models and popular large language models for speech recognition – the chip can run up to 20 tokens per second for instant AI assistant responses. Qualcomm boasts that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 packs the world’s fastest stable diffusion, which can generate an image in a fraction of a second. AI enhances the camera’s abilities as well. For example – Semantic Segmentation can enhance the vibrancy and detail of images in real-time, while Night Vision video can brighten a dark scene.

There’s LPDDR5x memory support up to 4800 MHz and as much as 24 GB. The chip supports Wi-Fi 7 up to 6 GHz, including 802.11be, 802.11ax, 80211ac, and 80211a/bg/n. The chip features the X75 5G modem with both sub-6 GHz and mmWave antennas.

Speaking of memory, the handset comes in 8GB/256GB, 12GB/256GB and 16GB/512GB configurations. For the record, we have the latter version in our office. The storage is, of course, UFS 4.0.

Now let’s see how the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside the Red Magic 8 Pro performs.

It’s no surprise to see the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 topping most of the charts but we were surprised to see the SoC trading blows with the Dimensity 9300-powered vivo X100 Pro in the single-core scenarios. Also, the Red Magic 9 Pro is outperformed by the iPhone Pro Max with its Apple A17 Pro chipset in both single and multi-core tasks. The difference is quite obvious in the multi-core test.

However, when it comes to pure GPU performance and combined performance, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the new king. Notably, the system was locked at 60 fps in the onscreen benchmark tests, so we suggest that you compare the 3DMark offscreen scenarios.

All in all, the key takeaway is that the Red Magic 9 Pro outperforms most smartphones out there in short benchmark tests and utilizes the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to the fullest. Let’s see how it performs under prolonged loads, though.

Cooling system and sustained performance

Nubia is once again updating the cooling system of its Red Magic lineup and this time around it’s called ICE 13 cooling system. It promises 18 °C lower thermals thanks to its newly designed vapor chamber and cooling fan.

The handset features a 10-layer cooling solution with a large vapor chamber located under the display, 10182mm2 in size.

The newly designed system offers straighter airflow for the cooling fan, which leads the hot air out without letting it sit centrally around the CPU.

Additionally, the fan is now more powerful and spins at 22,000 RPM, up from 20,000 RPM and it’s quieter now. We can confirm that it’s a tad more silent than its predecessor.

Unfortunately, though, we found the cooling system to be worse than the previous generations. After an hour-long CPU stress test, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 throttled down to about 65% of its theoretical performance within the first 10 minutes of the test and was able to maintain stable clock speeds either. For comparison, the Red Magic 8S Pro maintained 77% of its performance without the cooling fan.

Turning on the cooling fan at maximum speed significantly reduces the internal heat and lets the CPU breathe a little. As you can see, the CPU still dips below 70% but it’s able to maintain higher clock speeds overall. Still, we find the clocks a bit unstable – notice the apparent fluctuations on the graph.

Sadly, the device wasn’t able to pass the 3DMark Wild Life GPU stress test. It overheated before it was able to complete a full 20-minute cycle, with or without the cooling fan.

Even though the device maintains rather good performance considering the demanding flagship SoC, it’s surprising that the 9 Pro can’t handle any prolonged loads.

High refresh rate gaming performance

Historically, HRR gaming on Android is a hit or miss. Mostly a “miss”. So it’s no surprise that most games we’ve tried are capped at 60fps and can’t utilize the full potential of the 120Hz display. We used Android’s built-in screen refresh rate counter and Game Space’s FPS counter to see which games actually reach more than 60fps.

While the phone forced some titles at 120Hz, most were stuck at 60fps, including PUBG Mobile, Genshin Impact, Mobile Legends, Asphalt 9, etc.

Some games were compliant, though. Call of Duty got up to 90fps while Air Force 1945, Sky Force: Reloaded and Real Racing 3 saturated the 120Hz display. We double-checked using the Game Space FPS counter and Android’s built-in refresh rate counter.

New dual 50MP camera setup

The Red Magic 9 Pro sports a fairly new main camera sensor – it’s the same one from the previous two generations 8 Pro, but it’s a huge upgrade over the older Red Magic generations. The handset now uses a Samsung GN5 50MP ISOCELL sensor. It’s 1/1.57″ in size with 1.0µm pixels, and it’s paired with an f/1.9 lens. The only difference is the addition of OIS to the main cam.

The ultrawide finally gets an upgrade and is now Samsung JN1 50MP ISOCELL 1/2.76″, 0.64µm sensor coupled with f/2.2 aperture.

The macro shooter remains the same – 2MP f/2.4, so no changes here.

The under-display selfie camera hasn’t changed either – 16MP OV16E1Q sensor, 1/2.8″ in size and is paired with f/2.0 aperture.

However, nubia highlights a new 7-layer implementation of transparent materials in its 5th generation UDC hardware. The company calls the the industry’s first wave-type electrode trace program that reduces the diffraction of light coming into the selfie camera and improves image clarity.

Camera menus

Judging by the UI in general, there’s little to no change in the default camera app for a couple of generations now. So it wasn’t hard to find our way around it.

The camera menu is business as usual. Camera modes switch with a simple swipe left and right in a carousel formation. The additional settings menu is placed in the upper-right corner of the viewfinder, and the dedicated Pro mode offers quite a few settings to tinker with.

When shooting macro, you get a small magnifier, which you can move around the viewfinder, but more importantly – it has focus peaking. It allows you to hit the right focusing distance instead of guessing. We found this feature to be particularly useful since there’s no autofocus support. We only wish that the macro camera gets a toggle of its own.

Interestingly, the Pro mode works not only with the main camera but also with the ultrawide, but not the macro cam or the selfie.

Daylight photos

Main camera

The overall quality of stills taken with the main camera is pretty good. The images contain plenty of detail, sharpness is great, fine detail is easily spotted and colors are rather punchy.

However, even in not-so-challenging conditions, dynamic range leaves more to be desired. In high-contrast scenes, the highlights can be clipped while shadows are darker than they should be.

You can shoot in the full 50MP mode, but there’s hardly any benefit from it. Images are softer, with limited dynamic range and noisier.

2x zoom

Although there’s no dedicated 2x zoom toggle, you can pinch-to-zoom at up to 10x. We capture a couple of images in 2x crop zoom mode to show you the results. They are rather unimpressive – we’ve seen better implementations. Our main complaint is the inconsistent exposure metering and considerably softer nature of the whole scene compared to the standard 1x mode.

Ultrawide camera

We are happy to see the 8MP ultrawide camera gone, but the new 50MP unit doesn’t seem to differ much. We expected more than just marginal improvements in image quality. The ultrawide samples look grim, underexposed, soft and with limited dynamic range. Sharpness, on the other hand, is much better this time around.

Low-light photos

Main camera

The low-light main camera samples are largely unimpressive. They are underexposed, lack fine detail, light sources are often clipped and sharpness is unsatisfactory.

Alternatively, you can let the Night mode (which you can set to kick in automatically and we recommend doing that) iron out these issues. The dedicated Night mode improves sharpness, boosts dynamic range, brightens up the whole scene and restores quite a bit of lost detail

On the other hand, the Night mode comes off a little too aggressive. It makes the whole night scene seem like a day. The algorithm goes a bit overboard with the night sky – it lights up like early morning. We were also surprised with how slow the camera app stacks and processes Night mode images, considering the powerful ISP on board.

2x zoom

The Night mode works in the 2x zoom mode as well but it’s far from ideal too. Don’t expect sharp enough images.

Ultrawide camera

Without Night mode, the low-light ultrawide samples look pretty bad. They are soft with limited dynamic range, plenty of noise and are once again underexposed. The Night mode makes them usable, though, balancing out the highlights and shadows, boosting overall brightness and improving sharpness.

Here’s how the primary camera on the nubia Red Magic 8 Pro stacks against the rest of the competition in the controlled environment of our Photo Compare Tool.

Portraits

Potraits look pretty nice and there’s no significant difference between the dedicated Portrait mode and the standard Photo mode in terms of quality and overall rendering. The subject is always well-exposed, sharp, with true-to-life colors and the faux bokeh effect is convincing enough. No complaints here.

Selfies

It looks as if the new generation UDC provides some measurable benefits to the overall image quality. While still not ideal, the selfies are a considerable step in the right direction coming from the past generations. The selfies are somewhat cleaner with less glow in well-lit environments and the additional sharpness helps a lot. Two things we would like to see fixed in the next generation – better color reproduction and more accurate color temperature – light sources tend to be much warmer than they should.

Video recording

Just like its predecessors, the handset supports up to 8K@30fps video recording, while 4K videos can go up to 60fps. You have the option to turn off stabilization if you are shooting with a tripod and you’d need the extra field of view.

Starting with the 8K footage, we still have nothing to complain about. The video footage looks great – wide dynamic range, sharp enough, plenty of fine detail, smooth, no noise, adequate contrast and accurate color reproduction. The footage looks rather raw, though, as if nubia hasn’t applied any processing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the end result is excellent.

The 4K footage is no different. It just has just a tad less detail, but that’s due to the

lower resolution.

The ultrawide video is now 4K as the camera supports it. The footage itself isn’t amazing, but it’s a huge improvement over the previous generations. It’s sharper with a wider dynamic range, no noise, a decent amount of detail and accurate colors. It’s just a little underexposed once again.

The nighttime video is surprisingly sharp without much noise and with excellent dynamic range – light sources and highlights look great. Keep in mind that the video isn’t stabilized, EIS was off when recording.

You can also take a look at our video compare tool to see how nubia Red Magic 9 Pro stacks against the other phones we’ve reviewed.

Competition

The competition at this point is rather limited. The Red Magic 9 Pro is in a particularly comfortable spot given that there are no other strictly gaming-oriented smartphones on the market, and there are even fewer phones running on the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC.

But even with plenty of gaming-oriented rivals, competing with the Red Magic 9 Pro would still be hard. The global starting pricing for the entry-level 12GB/256GB 9 Pro is $649/£579/€649, or in other words – no changes compared to the Red Magic 8S Pro.

Aside from this year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chips, there’s the recently released iQOO 12, which is rocking the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and is also marketed as providing performance fit for a gaming phone. It’s a slightly pricier handset but offers a superior display, albeit with a punch-hole, nicer cameras, faster charging and surprisingly similar thermals. In fact, the iQOO 12 seems to maintain more stable clock speeds, ensuring smoother gameplay. And it completes a full 3DMark Wild Life stress test without overheating – something which we can’t say for the Red Magic 9 Pro.

Alternatively, the Asus ROG Phone 7, which is considerably more expensive, offers better overall gaming experience thanks to better thermal management, better support for high refresh rate gaming, better display and a more mature ecosystem with accessories.

Or if you are willing to wait a little longer and you have the budget for it, the ROG Phone 8 series is just around the corner, so you might want to wait a bit to see what Asus has been up to.

Verdict

Overall, the Red Magic 9 Pro is a capable gaming smartphone with tons of useful gaming features, excellent design, and probably one of the best, if not the best, price/performance ratios currently on the market. Kudos to nubia for maintaining its competitive pricing.

It’s not only an affordable Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 option, but it also offers outstanding battery life (even better than before), decently fast charging and a great set of stereo speakers.

However, it’s hard to get over the fact that this is the first Red Magic phone to overheat under prolonged loads. We checked, and every single Red Magic phone we’ve tested kept its cool under prolonged loads. That used to be its shtick, and now it’s gone. Also, the display is not as competitive in brightness and HDR capabilities, the software still needs better translation, and the high refresh rate gaming is still a hit-and-miss.

Pros

• Unique flat, premium design.
• Large and fast 120Hz OLED panel, the UD selfie camera is inconspicuous.
• Exceptional battery life, fast charging.
• Plenty of gaming-oriented features, including pressure-sensitive shoulder triggers.
• Flexible and well-executed external display and peripherals gaming experience.
• Nice sounding stereo speakers.
• A decent ultrawide camera, finally.
• Feature-rich Redmagic OS 9

Cons

• The cooling solution underperforms compared to previous generations.
• The display is not among the brightest and does not support HDR video.
• The software is still plagued by awkward English translations from Chinese.
• Ultrawide and selfie cameras are still rather underwhelming.