Realme GT2 review

Realme UI 3.0 and Android 12

Realme UI 3.0 is a familiar OS running on top of Android 12. Most of the features we saw in the GT2 Pro are available here as well, except those that require some specific hardware. And since the GT2 and the GT2 Pro are pretty similar to each other, there's little to no difference in the software as well.

Visually, the OS hasn't changed much. Realme UI has a colorful UI with customizable UI elements and its own iconography for the notification shade and the general Settings menu. The app drawer hasn't been tweaked either, but we did notice a bit of inconsistency with the swipe up and swipe down gestures on the Home screen when opening/closing the drawer. A small annoyance that shouldn't bother most users.

Home screen, recent apps, notification shade, Settings menu

Realme also kept the so-called Icon pull-down gesture. Swiping alongside the left or right edge of the screen crams icons at the bottom half of the screen so they can be easily reached with your thumb. The gesture is pretty reliable as well. By default, the swipe down gesture on the Home screen opens up the so-called global search, but you can always set the notification shade instead.

Icon pull-down gesture

When it comes to Android 12-specific features, most of them are under-the-hood changes. However, the privacy-focused efforts from Google are translated into Realme UI 3.0. The so-called Privacy dashboard is one example. It's a unified view for all your permissions and user data settings. It gives you information on which apps and how often they access your information or ask for certain permissions. It looks and feels like the Digital wellbeing dashboard introduced with Android 10.

Privacy dashboard settings

In addition to those privacy features, Android 12 lets you choose the accuracy of your location shared with certain apps. Let's say you want to share an approximate location with some apps instead of your exact location. And when a certain app is accessing your mic or camera, a green dot will appear in the upper-right corner of the screen so you'd know what's going on.

For a more in-depth look at Android 12, we suggest reading our full Android 12 review as we will try to focus on the Realme UI itself in the following paragraphs.

As before, Realme UI offers deep customization of the interface by letting you choose accent colors (or a combination of accent colors), wallpapers, icons, the shape of the quick toggles as well as the font and size. All of these settings are found in the Personalization sub-menu.

Personalization options

The Dark mode isn't a new feature, especially for Realme's UI, but with the second iteration of the OS, you get some additional options. Scheduling the Dark mode is possible, of course, and forcing it on third-party apps is also available. However, we were surprised by the color schemes, as the Dark mode now offers three variations - dark gray instead of black and a bit lighter gray. The gray color has been proven to be just as effective as the pitch-black color when it comes to energy consumption. So going for a lighter gray might be a sweet spot for users that are hesitant to use the conventional Dark mode.

The Always-on display customizations aren't left out. You can customize it to your liking or choose from the default presets. Scheduling is also an option.

Always-on display

Under the Special features sub-menu, Realme put the Smart sidebar and Flexible windows features, both of which boost multitasking. When turned on, the sidebar offers quick access to some of your favorite apps. The system allows you to adjust the position of the sidebar, which is crucial because it might interfere with the back gesture if you are using the standard Android gestures. Anyway, tap and hold on an app icon enters split-screen mode while a single tap opens up the app in a floating window or as Realme likes to call it, "Flexible window". The supported apps can be opened in small, draggable and size-adjustable windows.

Smart Sidebar and Floating window

A few good words about the vibration motor - it seems to be improved upon as the haptic feedback feels precise, punchy and strong. It feels great alongside the whole frame of the phone when typing or during certain actions when navigating through menus and apps.

The good old screen-off gestures that allow you to launch certain apps or the flashlight by drawing letters on a locked screen are here to stay.

Screen-off gestures

In the Realme labs, where the company likes to introduce experimental features, there's one that caught our eye. You can stream music to a Bluetooth headset and wired headphones simultaneously. Pretty neat if you are traveling with a friend and want to listen to the same tunes.

Advanced fingerprint reader features

Lastly, let's talk about the fingerprint reader. It's fast, it's accurate and reliable. This one seems to be at the right spot. Two new features are now available with the fingerprint reader, though. One of them is the built-in heart rate monitor, which seems to be rather okay in terms of accuracy in the user's resting state, but it's largely inconsistent also. A Quick launch option is now available and seems to be taken straight from OnePlus' OxygenOS. You just tap on the fingerprint scanner and hold until icons for your pre-defined apps appear. Dragging your finger on one of them launches the app in question.

All in all, though, the Realme UI 3.0 looks snappy, offers some new features and looks and feels the same as the previous iteration of the software, for better or worse. It's also highly customizable, and that's something a lot of Android users are looking for. Bonus points for that.

Synthetic and sustained performance

Being the cheaper option of the two, the vanilla GT2 uses last year's top-tier SoC from Qualcomm, which arguably is a better solution from price/performance standpoint. Sure, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is one powerful chip with substantial performance gain over its predecessor, but it's hardly justified for the vast majority of users. The Snapdragon 888 chipset is capable of serious number crunching and can run pretty much everything you throw at it.

The SD 888 is built on the 5nm manufacturing process by Samsung and uses an octa-core CPU. The latter consists of 1x 2.84 GHz Kryo 680 Prime (Cortex-X1) core + 3x 2.42 GHz Kryo 680 Gold (Cortex-A78) cores + 4x 1.80 GHz Kryo 680 Silver (Cortex-A55) cores. The Adreno 660 GPU clocked at 840 MHz takes care of the graphically-intensive tasks.

The Realme GT2 comes in three storage configurations as opposed to the GT2 Pro, that offers four flavors, one of which is is 512GB. The standard GT2's base configuration is 8GB/128GB, whereas the other two are 8GB/256GB and 12GB/256GB. Of course, all options use UFS 3.1 storage chips.

We ran the usual synthetic benchmarks to assess the implementation of the Snapdragon 888 and how it fares against other similarly-priced alternatives.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12
  3652
• OnePlus 9
  3629
• Realme GT 5G
  3555
• Samsung Galaxy S22+ (Max processing)
  3542
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  3528
• Realme GT2 Pro
  3501
• Realme GT2
  3487
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
  3476
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  3049
• Xiaomi 11T
  2834

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Realme GT2 Pro
  1238
• Xiaomi 12
  1187
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  1165
• Realme GT 5G
  1139
• Realme GT2
  1131
• OnePlus 9
  1129
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  1096
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
  1091
• Samsung Galaxy S22+ (Max processing)
  1037
• Xiaomi 11T
  742

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12
  985115
• Realme GT2 Pro
  966251
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  886916
• Realme GT2
  810512
• Realme GT 5G
  810433
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  719696
• Xiaomi 11T
  590837

3DMark Wild Life Vulkan 1.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12
  9535
• Realme GT2 Pro
  9487
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  7405
• Realme GT2
  5879
• Realme GT 5G
  5872
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
  5757
• OnePlus 9
  5667
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  5432
• Xiaomi 11T
  4172

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12
  75
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  68
• OnePlus 9
  58
• Realme GT2
  56
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  56
• Realme GT 5G
  55
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
  54
• Realme GT2 Pro
  48
• Xiaomi 11T
  40

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Realme GT2 Pro
  95
• Xiaomi 12
  84
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  76
• OnePlus 9
  70
• Realme GT2
  68
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
  66
• Realme GT 5G
  65
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  57
• Xiaomi 11T
  47

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Realme GT2 Pro
  46
• Xiaomi 12
  45
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  34
• Realme GT2
  30
• OnePlus 9
  30
• Realme GT 5G
  29
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
  26
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  25
• Xiaomi 11T
  20

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12
  59
• Samsung Galaxy S22+
  51
• OnePlus 9
  43
• Realme GT2 Pro
  39
• Realme GT2
  38
• Realme GT 5G
  38
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  38
• Samsung Galaxy S21+ 5G
  37
• Xiaomi 11T
  29

The Snapdragon 888 inside the Realme GT2 performs as expected with no serious deviations from other SD 888-powered phones. It's also right up there with the best-performing SoCs in the industry trailing only the Exynos 2200 chip from Samsung and this year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. In some instances, like the CPU-bound workloads, last year's Exynos 2100 is doing better, too.

Note that in the onscreen GPU tests or combined workloads like AnTuTu 9, the GT2 may post considerably higher results than other SD 888 handsets and current SD8 Gen 1 smartphones because of the lower 1080p resolution, while premium flagships with 1440p displays struggle to reach the same frames per second.

Sustained performance

The Realme GT2 Pro proved to be an excellent performer during long and heavy workloads thanks to its 9-layer cooling design. The GT2, on the other hand, uses an 8-layer cooling design, and the company doesn't specify which layer has been left out. Either way, the standard cooling solution for the devices includes a stainless steel vapor chamber with 36,761 mm2 cooling surface area and is 26% larger than the one used in the previous Realme GT series. There's also a diamond thermal gel with 50-60% better thermal conductivity than standard thermal pastes. The stainless steel chamber has been complemented with an additional copper alloy layer. Once again, one of those components or an unnamed one is missing from the vanilla GT2.

However, the results from our stress test are more than promising. The hour-long CPU throttle test showed a relatively flat curve and the system maintained about 90% of the maximum CPU performance for most of the time. In fact, there was a brief drop to 81% before returning back to the 90% zone. That's an outstanding result for a powerful flagship, and it's close to what we got on the GT2 Pro with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

CPU throttle test: 30 mins • 60 mins

We also didn't find the phone's back all that hot. The side frame was sensibly warmer, but the back remained adequately warm without causing discomfort.

3DMark Wild Life stress test

The 20-minute, GPU-heavy Wild Life Unlimited Stress test returned a good score as well - 68.7% stability with a relatively gradual decline in performance from loop to loop.