nubia Red Magic 8S Pro review

Redmagic OS 8 based on Android 13

The Red Magic 8S Pro comes with an upgraded Redmagic OS version 8, compared to version 6 on the previous 8 Pro. However, the differences between the new and the old version of the system are small. We did find some missing features in the new version and changed iconography around the system menus. The software feels more polished.

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.

Home screen, notification shade, recent apps, settings menu

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.

Customization options

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.

AoD options

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

RGB lighting customizations

What you can do in terms of two-app multitasking is enable split-screen view. That is done from a special icon in the recent apps carousel. Interestingly, the floating window function is no longer available in this version of the software.

Split-screen

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.

In-game overlay

Game Shorthand is a brand new 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.

Game Space and game plugins

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.

Of course, there are the shoulder triggers - one of the best gaming features of the Red Magic 8S Pro by far. They provide a really nice experience for racing and first-person shooter games. The software lets you map certain controls to the triggers and adjust the pressure sensitivity to avoid mistouches.

Shoulder triggers

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 8 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 8 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.

Gaming using the Red Magic Studio PC app

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.

Red Magic Studio

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

Screen casting via Red Magic Studio

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 2 main chipset for better performance.

The Red Magic 8 Pro also includes something called a "cube performance optimizer" (CPO), which promises to smooth out in-game frame rates without increasing power consumption. We assume it is a sort of MEMC chip, though nubia isn't particularly descriptive when it comes to its nature.

The Red Magic 8 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.