nubia Red Magic 10 Pro review

Redmagic OS 10 with Android 15

The Red Magic 10 Pro runs on the latest customized Redmagic OS 10, based on Android 15. The company promises just one Android upgrade to Android 16 and three years of security patches. You'd also be getting 2 upgrades of the Magic OS for what that's worth.

As far as changes go, the new software looks and feels exactly like the old one we used on the Red Magic 9S Pro. So go and check out the Software section of that review to get a good grasp.

Redmagic OS 10

There are a couple of new software features to talk about, though, and they are naturally AI-powered.

Redmagic OS 10

For instance, the new Redmagic OS 10 takes advantage of all the features under the Gemini AI umbrella. That includes AI Photo Search, various tools for image editing, real-time translation, etc.

Gamespace

The Gamespace is an in-game overlay and a set of tools designed to enhance the gaming experience and has been a staple of the Red Magic gaming phones since their inception. It hasn't changed much over the past couple of generations, but this one adds a few extra features. But first, let's go through the most notable functionalities.

Gamespace and in-game overlay

The Game space's in-game overlay has experienced a significant 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. Using an overlay, you can monitor your CPU and GPU frequency and, crucially, in-game fps. There are some quick access shortcuts for supported messenger apps as well for more convenient window-based chatting while in the game.

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

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

Plugins

X Gravity is the system nubia uses to map external devices like a controller or keyboard and mouse to on-screen controls. This is something that the Red Magic 10 Pro lets you easily do out of the box, which is a bit controversial for competitive play since it offers a major advantage. But you can also turn the phone into a controller when playing games on an external screen.

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.

AI Trigger offers some competitive advantage as the system waits for a certain event to happen, say an 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 10 Pro by far. They provide a really nice experience for racing and first-person shooter games. Or you can map a certain action or tap with a tilt gesture, for example. So instead of reloading with a tap, you can just til the phone and reload your weapon. It's quite convenient and it's found under the weirdly-translated "Somatosensory manipulation" sub-menu.

Shoulder triggers

The new Gamespace now adds a handful of filter overlays. Each one offers unique color corrections and some of them may even provide a competitive advantage in some games. The Scout mode, for example, zooms in in the middle of the screen to help with visibility of enemies in the distance.

New color filters

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 9S 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 from the Red Magic 10 Pro and USB inputs back into the phone. This is a great way to connect it directly to a monitor or TV.

Red Magic Studio on PC

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 a 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.

Red Magic Studio settings

The streaming feature works in all phone menus and apps, not just games, so it may be useful 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.

Benchmark performance

The nubia Red Magic 10 Pro one of the first batch of smartphones we got with a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset inside - Qualcomm's latest isn't simply another in the long line of incremental improvements, but rather an all-new custom design (as opposed to being ARM-based like the previous generations). The 3nm chip with in-house cores and super-high CPU frequencies takes on Mediatek with their latest Dimensity's all-big-core approach in what is looking like the most exciting generation of Android silicon in a while.

The Elite uses Oryon cores, two versions of them - two Prime cores and six Performance cores. These aren't Cortex cores like in MediaTek and Samsung chipsets, but a Qualcomm design. The two Prime Oryon V2 Phoenix L cores run at up to 4.32GHz, which is an insane speed for a pocketable device and are joined by by 6x Oryon V2 Phoenix M, ticking at 3.53 GHz.

On the GPU front, there's the Adreno 830, built on a new architecture using a sliced design with dedicated memory for each slice. The 830 has three of these slices clocked at up to 1.1GHz.

Regarding storage, nubia is bringing all of the Red Magic 10 Pro configurations to the global market. You can choose between 12GB/256GB, 16GB/512GB and 16GB/512GB. According to the manufacturer, the handset uses UFS 4.1 Pro storage chips, which is an improved version of UFS 4.1 with better controller, promising more than 8 GB/s read speeds. However, we were able to get around 4 GB/s, which is around the UFS 4.0/4.1 territory.

Here are the benchmarks.

The Red Magic 10 Pro performs almost as expected. The CPU scores are in line with the rest of the Snapdragon 8 Elite phones, but the combined and GPU-intensive benchmarks show slightly lower performance than usual. This can be attributed to various factors, such as an early pre-production unit or a software issue, which will likely be resolved soon.

In any case, the device's Snapdragon 8 Elite performs considerably better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside the Red Magic 9S Pro predecessor.

Sustained performance

The Red Magic gaming phone series is well-known for its cooling capabilities, facilitated by the passive cooling solution that features a multi-layered heat sink for improved heat dissipation and an active cooling fan, spinning at 23,000 RPM. Nubia calls the cooling solution ICE-X, and this year, it brings yet another upgrade - liquid metal. In fact, this is touted as the first smartphone with liquid metal cooling solution.

Unfortunately, this is the first Red Magic phone in a long time that doesn't stand up to the hype. The CPU throttled severely under load in the first few minutes of the test and the cooling fan doesn't seem to improve the situation.

CPU throttling: Fan ON • Fan OFF

On the other hand, the GPU stress test with the cooling fan returned excellent score with almost 94% stability.

GPU throttling: Fan ON • Fan OFF

It's perhaps important to note that this is an extreme scenario and we found the device to perform excellently during normal gaming sessions without any hiccups, stutters or overheating. Still, we've seen way better cooling solutions from nubia and other non-nubia branded phones running on powerful SoCs.

HRR gaming

Historically, high-refresh-rate gaming on Android has been hit or 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 reached 90fps while Air Force 1945, Sky Force: Reloaded, Brawl Stars, Vainglory, League of Legends Wild Rift and Real Racing 3 saturated the 144Hz display.