Realme GT 7 Pro review

Android 15 with Realme UI 6.0 on top

The Realme GT 7 Pro is running Android 15, augmented by a layer of Realme UI 6.0, an alter ego of the Color OS we expect to see on the Oppo Find X8 pair. Realme has committed to offering 3 major OS upgrades and 4 years of security patches - not the longest support policy, but not too bad either.

A hatful of features with AI in their names are now part of the package too - Realme has decided to call the GT 7 Pro 'The Dark Horse of AI in the Industry' for reasons that can't fully fathom, but there have to be AI bits to warrant that.

The overall look and feel is very much unchanged from the Color OS / Realme UI of yesteryear, though there is a certain tendency for polishing and refinement to be found here or there - like the About screen, for example, which now has nicer visuals.

You'll be seeing the usual lockscreen and homescreens, and there haven't been changes to the quick settings area in the notification shade either (Oppo might be doing more in that direction - we'll see about that in the coming days). The Settings menu still has the same colorful icons for the different sections too.

Not Color OS on the Realme GT 7 Pro

'The Dark Horse of AI in the Industry' comes with a host of AI-enabled features, some of them previously available on Realme UI 5.0, some of them - new. The pre-existing ones include a Circle to Search-like AI Screen Recognition feature, where you long-press with two fingers (there are alternative gestures if you're not fond of this one), and the phone scans the information on the screen and highlights images and text for you to interact with. You can then save the text to the so-called File Dock, or long-press on images to save or share them.

You can also choose to drag them to the side, where the AI Smart Loop engages. It's a carousel of pre-selected apps where you can drop the image or text for sharing or searching or whatnot - the app selection is customizable. Some apps have sub-actions to choose from - like on Instagram you can pick between your feed, story, or DM.

AI Screen Recognition • AI Smart Loop • AI Eye Care

Also previously available were two more AI features that can be found in the in-house Photos app - AI Eraser and AI Ultra Clarity. We have already experienced those on the Realme 13 Pro+, with questionable results and overall utility that don't necessarily go beyond the level of a gimmick.

New this time around is the Sketch to Image functionality. You can draw a stick figure on the screen (you do better than that if you can) and have the AI generate pictures in different styles. Alternatively, you can take a photo of a drawing you made the old-fashioned pencil and paper way. Sketch to Image can be summoned from the Smart sidebar (long-standing Color OS dock/pane of shortcuts) or the editor in the in-house Photos app. The feature still wasn't operational during our review process, however.

Another one in the soon-to-come category is the AI Motion Deblur that can attempt to fix, you guessed it, motion blur in photos. It will probably be helpful in instances with fast-moving subjects (pets, children, dirt bikes) where you didn't have the forethought to use a manual mode and fast shutter speeds when taking the picture. We expect mixed results from this one too.

AI options in the gallery • Sketch to image • AI Eraser

There's also AI Gaming Super Resolution and Super Frame that supposedly enhance visuals in games. Super Resolution works in Genshin and Honkai: Star Rail, while Super Frame rate is for those two, plus Free Fire MAX, PUBG, and Honor of Kings.

Performance and benchmarks

The GT 7 Pro is one of the first smartphones we encounter with a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset inside - Qualcomm's latest isn't simply another in the long line of incremental improvements, but rather an all-new custom design (as opposed to being ARM-based like the previous generations). The 3nm chip with in-house cores and super-high CPU frequencies takes on Mediatek with their latest Dimensity's all-big-core approach in what is looking like the most exciting generation of Android silicon in a while.

The Elite uses Oryon cores, two versions of them - two Prime cores and six Performance cores. These aren't Cortex cores like in MediaTek and Samsung chipsets, but a Qualcomm design. The two Prime cores run at up to 4.32GHz, which is an insane speed for a pocketable device. Apple's A18 Pro broke the 4GHz barrier earlier this year, but only just - it runs at up to 4.05GHz. The Dimensity 9400's Cortex-X925 stays well below 4GHz - at 3.63GHz. Outside of laptops, the highest clock speed you can find on a mobile device is the Apple M4 in the iPad Pro (2024) tablets at 4.4GHz. But in the confined spaces of the phone form factor, Oryon is the king of clock speed.

2x 4.32GHz Oryon prime cores + 6x Oryon performance cores

On the GPU front, there's the Adreno 830, which is built on a new architecture using a sliced design with dedicated memory for each slice. The 830 has three of these slices clocked at up to 1.1GHz.

Three GPU slices at up to 1.1GHz, plus dedicated memory

In China, the GT 7 Pro comes in five memory variants ranging from 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. As best as we can tell, international GT 7 Pros will exist in 12GB/256GB and 16GB/512GB trim levels. Our review unit is the 16GB/512GB spec. The RAM type is LPDDR5X and storage complies to the UFS 4.0 standard.

We had a couple of early looks at the Realme GT 7 Pro's benchmark scores, so we won't be telling you anything new here - we compared it to the previous Snapdragons, as well as to the one Dimensity 9400 phone we've had in the database.

The high-end phones rocking these chips are only now starting to come into the office, so there'll be more numbers in the weeks and months ahead of us, but the ballpark has been set, and the Elite is proving to be a significant step up for the Snapdragon lineup.

We never got the advertised 3+M points in Antutu, and the Dimensity has a bit of an edge there, as it does in our GPU benchmarks. In CPU comparisons, on the other hand, the Elite does reign supreme, whether in single-core or multi-core tests.

Under prolonged load, the new Snapdragon isn't particularly stable, but then high-end chips rarely are - outside of actively-cooled gaming phones. We got a 55% result in the CPU Throttling test and not a very gradual ramp down in performance either. The GPU stability turned out better than expected though, the score progression and the 71% end result looking almost praise worthy.

CPU Throttling test • Wild Life Extreme stress test