nubia Z60 Ultra review

MyOS 14 on top of Android 14

The nubia Z60 Ultra runs Android 14 with a layer of proprietary software on top dubbed MyOS - it too at v14. While it's technically not the same thing, it's also kind of the same thing as the Red Magic OS 9 that we got to experience on the Red Magic 9 Pro a while back. That sameness goes all the way to the extensive functionality of the Game Space utility, which makes the Z60 Ultra a gaming phone in disguise.

Among the familiar and most obvious customizations in MyOS has been in the quick toggles area, where the initial swipe would get you 4 large bubbles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data, and flashlight. That meanwhile became the default Android look, though MyOS' take still has its own personality.

MyOS 14

There's also a large brightness slider with an Auto toggle - something missing in the default Android shade and in a lot of custom builds.

As mentioned, the Z60 Ultra borrows the Game space in-game utility that you might be familiar with from the Red Magic phones. It consists of two large symmetrical menus on each side of the display, with most of the functions readily accessible with a single tap. You can monitor your CPU and GPU frequency as well as, crucially, in-game fps using an overlay.

Most of the interesting and powerful settings are located in their own sub-menu within the overlay. X Gravity is the system nubia uses to map external devices like a controller or keyboard and mouse to on-screen controls.

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. 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 draws an overlay on the screen, and it can also zoom into a particular area of the frame. AI Trigger, meanwhile, waits for a certain event to happen, say empty magazine, and it will automatically tap on the reload button.

So yes, maybe you came here for the camera system, but you might be staying for the gaming prowess of the nubia Z60 Ultra.

Gaming on the Z60 Ultra

Benchmarks

The Z60 Ultra doesn't stray from the pack and relies on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to do its number crunching. The Qualcomm high-end chip for 2024 is made on a 4nm process and features an octa-core CPU in a 1+3+2+2 layout (1 Cortex-X4 prime core at up to 3.3GHz). The GPU is the Adreno 750.

A whole bunch of memory configurations exist, spanning from a relatively modest 8GB/256GB to a bonkers 24GB/1TB. Not all of them are available outside of China, however, and global markets get 12GB/256GB and 16GB/512GB versions (maybe the base tier in some locales). We reviewed the 16GB/512GB spec, and its storage speed was consistent with the UFS 4.0 standard's numbers.

In the benchmark runs that we did on the nubia Z60 Ultra, it posted scores that placed it first among equals in the graphics department and also among the top performers in GeekBench and Antutu. There was no performance mode or anything; that's just what the phone scores.

We've discontinued GFXBench graphics benchmarking as the app is often banned/blacklisted on the phones we receive for review. The graphics performance ranking in 3D Mark is just as meaningful; refer to that one instead.

Under sustained load, the Z60 Ultra behaved rather interestingly in our experience, and not necessarily entirely in a good way.

In the CPU throttling test, things were quite alright, only dropping to as low as 74% of its peak result, but actually able to sustain a higher level for extended periods of time.

The 3DMark Wild Life stress test is where things got hot. The 67% stability result there is better than a lot of the recent SD 8 Gen 3 phones we've tested (Galaxy S24 Ultra, Zenfone 11 Ultra, Find X7 Ultra) but the nubia achieved that by getting all too hot - impossible to hold hot.

We understand that it's likely using the frame as a radiator, diverting heat away from the components that generate it, but it's too much. Meanwhile, other handsets with the same chipset (Honor Magic6 Pro and Xiaomi 14 Ultra) managed similar stability scores in 3DMark without becoming unusable in the process.

CPU Throttling test • 3DMark Wild Life stress test