RedMagic 8 Pro

Bags of power, gaming enhancements and battery life, but camera and software weaknesses dampen its appeal

-  RICHARD PRIDAY

Why is PC Pro devoting three pages to a gaming phone? The answer lies within: this is the debut for Qualcomm’s most powerful silicon yet, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Qualcomm claims a trio of benefits: a 25% boost in performance in daily tasks, 30% for games and a 45% improvement in power efficiency. It even supports Wi-Fi 7.

It remains an eight-core chip, but where before the prime core (now the Cortex-X3) was accompanied by three performance cores and four efficiency cores, this year there are four performance cores and three geared for efficiency. They’re all clocked faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips but share the same frequency as the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 platform released in mid-2022.

The Adreno GPU has also enjoyed an upgrade (the 740 versus the 730). Along with support for Vulkan 1.3, it now provides real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing in games that offer it. So not only will games run more quickly – particularly handy for gaming phones such as this with high-refresh-rate screens – but they should look better, too.

Real-world performance 

You only need look at the graphs on the opposite page to see Qualcomm’s claims borne out. And this is with the Matte version of the RedMagic 8 Pro, which comes with 12GB of RAM rather than the 16GB of the Void edition.

It’s impressive to see the RedMagic 8 Pro not only crush the Google Pixel 7 Pro (see issue 339, p72) and Samsung Galaxy S22 (see issue 332, p68) in these tests, but also match the iPhone 14 Pro Max on the two Wild Life GPU tests. It’s not far behind Apple in Geekbench 5’s multicore test, either.