nubia Red Magic 9 Pro review

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.

Home screen • Lock screen • Notification shade • Notification shade • App drawer • Recent apps • Settings • Settings

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.

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 settings

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

LED lighting

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.

Sound settings

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.

In-game overlay

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.

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.

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.

Shoulder trigger settings

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.

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 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 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.