nubia Red Magic 7S Pro review

Synthetic benchmarks

As usual, the latest Red Magic smartphone runs on the latest flagship SoC from Qualcomm; in this case, it's the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Although largely similar to its predecessor, some under-the-hood changes set it apart. Most notably, the new chipset is manufactured in TSMC's 4nm fabs instead of Samsung's. This alone is supposed to improve thermals and overall efficiency. Qualcomm says it's about 30%, which is quite the jump for a non-generational upgrade.

Thanks to its higher clock speeds, the Plus version promises 10% increase in both CPU and GPU performance. The processor is now running its main Cortex-X2 core at 3.2 GHz instead of 3.0 GHz, the three big Cortex-A710 cores work at 2.75 GHz instead of 2.50 GHz, while the four energy-efficient and smaller Cortex-A510 cores keep the 1.80 GHz clock speed. The Adreno 730 GPU's frequency is now 900Hz translating into a 10% performance increase.

Aside from the CPU and GPU, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is also bringing a new Spectra ISP, premium Snapdragon Sound and more power-efficient NPU computing. The ISP can now record 8K HDR footage and video bokeh effect alongside face tracking simultaneously. The NPU's capabilities have been bumped up 20% per watt.

There's also the Volumetric rendering support and improved power efficiency during gaming, and those alone theoretically boost gaming time by about an hour. Now off to the benchmarks to see how well it fares against the competition and to see if nubia's implementation of the SoC is successful.

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  1741
• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  1345
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  1329
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  1324
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  1251
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  1180
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  1176
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  1140
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  1110
• Poco F4
  975
• Realme GT Neo3
  968

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  4706
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  4300
• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  4231
• Realme GT Neo3
  4079
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  3980
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  3845
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  3665
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  3660
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  3657
• Poco F4
  3190
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  2659

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  1103188
• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  1087412
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  1056511
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  1039412
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  1007133
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  968359
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  866437
• Realme GT Neo3
  819348
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  801691
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  762090
• Poco F4
  698586

GFX Aztek ES 3.1 High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  62
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  61
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  61
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  58
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  58
• Realme GT Neo3
  42
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  40
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  38
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  30

GFX Aztek ES 3.1 High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  46
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  46
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  46
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  43
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  41
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  33
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  31
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  29
• Realme GT Neo3
  27

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  52
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  51
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  51
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  50
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  48
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  44
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  36
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  35
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  32
• Realme GT Neo3
  28

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  69
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  64
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  63
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  61
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  55
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  45
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  44
• Realme GT Neo3
  43
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  39
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  29

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  82
• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  81
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  79
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  79
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  77
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  62
• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  60
• Realme GT Neo3
  53
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  51
• Poco F4
  49
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  37

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max
  121
• nubia Red Magic 7S Pro
  104
• Xiaomi 12S Ultra
  104
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro
  103
• Asus ROG Phone 6 Pro (X Mode+)
  102
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7 Pro
  97
• Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro
  96
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  76
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  74
• Realme GT Neo3
  60
• Poco F4
  59

As the benchmarks show, nubia has once again made successful implementation of the latest Qualcomm flagship SoC and utilizing the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1's full potential. In fact, in most tests, the handset scored higher than other Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1-powered devices.

It's also measurably faster than the previous Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Samsung's Exynos 2200 silicon. In some of the onscreen tests, the Red Magic 7S Pro scores considerably higher than other comparable devices because of the resolution. The Red Magic 7S Pro has a gaming-friendly 1080p panel.

Sustained performance

The Red Magic phones have always been one of the best-performing devices when it comes to sustained load. Even without resorting to the cooling fan itself, even. That's because of the beefy cooling design that consists of ten layers. One of them is new and is called "Energy Storage Phase Change Composite Graphene".

The rest are a combo of vapor chambers, aluminum, thermal gel and copper foil. Last but not least, we have the cooling fan as well, which remains at 20,000 maximum RPM. This one gets pretty loud at a higher gear, but it's not too distracting. Perhaps turn it off when charging because it may disrupt your sleep at night, and we didn't find any profound effect on charging times.

We ran the usual CPU throttle test for an hour and found that the sustained performance had improved a little. The previous version of the phone throttled down to 82% of the maximum CPU performance, while the 7S Pro dropped only to 84%. Keep in mind that this could be just a statistical error. Then again, the performance graph over time seems slightly smoother than before.

CPU throttle test w/o fan: 30 min • 60 min

Running the fan at maximum speed while testing the thermal throttling of the CPU didn't help much with the throttling itself in the sense that the CPU still throttled down to 85% of its maximum performance, but the performance curve is considerably smoother. This means that the fan helps with stability during gaming, so there aren't big deviations from the average, say, for example, big spikes or drops in fps.

CPU throttle test with fan: 30 min • 60 min

External temperatures, however, remain pretty high. After an hour-long stress test, the chassis was pretty hot to touch, especially on the side metal frame.

High refresh rate gaming

We used Android 12's built-in refresh rate counter alongside Game Space's built-in FPS counter to determine which games really run at more than 60fps. Sadly, for the most part, games ran at 120Hz, but the actual FPS counter showed 60fps. We tried AAA titles like Garena Free Fire, Genshin Impact, Mobile Legends, Arena of Valor, Asphalt 9, Real Racing 3 and even PUBG Mobile. They were all locked up to 60fps, while Garena Free Fire and PUBG required additional tweaking in their respective settings menus to go from 30 to 60fps.

There were some games that utilized the HRR display to some degree. Call of Duty Mobile got up to 90fps, Air Force 1945 got all the 120Hz, as well as Sky Force: Reloaded and Real Racing 3.

Unfortunately, we are still far from proper HRR gaming on Android phones, but the efforts are noticeable. Still, be prepared for the majority of games not to be able to saturate that speedy 120Hz display.