nubia Red Magic Nova review

Redmagic OS 9.5 on top of Android 14

The Red Magic Nova comes with a pre-installed Redmagic OS 9.5 proprietary overlay on top of Android 14. Unfortunately, nubia doesn't clarify how many major updates the tablet will get.

As far as UI goes, it's heavily customized, but there are glimpses of vanilla Android; more specifically - the quick toggles are in the notification shade.

Redmagic OS 9.5

If you've ever used Red Magic phones before, you will feel right at home. There aren't any changes or major differences.

Redmagic OS 9.5

There aren't any new features either, except for the stylus and keyboard settings, as the tablet supports both types of accessories.

The haptic feedback when clicking various stuff in the UI is nice and strong. We think it adds to the overall great (gaming) experience.

Game Space and screen casting

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 game.

Game Space

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.

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 simultaneously - 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 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 Nova lets you easily do out of the box, which is 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 an empty magazine, and it will automatically tap on the reload button.

Redmagic studio for PC

If 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.

Redmagic studio for PC

The streaming feature works in all tablet menus and apps, not just games, so it may be useful for more than just gaming. But the screen casting feature is pretty simple. It only clones the tablet's display, but it works over Wi-Fi and over cable. The USB-C port supports video out.

Performance and benchmarks

The Red Magic Nova runs the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Leading Edition with a 3.4GHz Cortex-X4 prime core and an Adreno 750 GPU frequency of 1GHz - the highest-clocked variants of the SoC around, matching the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for the Galaxy.

The international version of the tablet comes with either 12 GB or 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB or 512GB UFS4.0 storage.

Quite expectedly, the benchmark scores are chart-topping.

What is more interesting is the performance stability. We used the balanced option for the cooling fan first. The Red Magic Nova's performance dipped down to 64% of its max CPU performance and and down to 86% of the max GPU performance in the corresponding prolonged stress tests. The Nova never got hot, just warm around the heat pipe and the fan noise was barely audible.

Fan mode Balanced: CPU throttling test • 3D Mark GPU Stress test

Next, we tested with the fan at maximum speed. The CPU performance improved to 77%, while the GPU performance stayed at about 85% under the sustained load. The tablet once again became warm but not hot.

Fan mode Maximum: CPU throttling test • 3D Mark GPU Stress test

Overall, the Red Magic Nova tablet appears to be well built as a gaming machine and offers excellent performance and stability.