RedMagic 8 Pro

Bags of power, gaming enhancements and battery life, but camera and software weaknesses dampen its appeal

-  RICHARD PRIDAY

Why is PC Pro devoting three pages to a gaming phone? The answer lies within: this is the debut for Qualcomm’s most powerful silicon yet, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Qualcomm claims a trio of benefits: a 25% boost in performance in daily tasks, 30% for games and a 45% improvement in power efficiency. It even supports Wi-Fi 7.

It remains an eight-core chip, but where before the prime core (now the Cortex-X3) was accompanied by three performance cores and four efficiency cores, this year there are four performance cores and three geared for efficiency. They’re all clocked faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips but share the same frequency as the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 platform released in mid-2022.

The Adreno GPU has also enjoyed an upgrade (the 740 versus the 730). Along with support for Vulkan 1.3, it now provides real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing in games that offer it. So not only will games run more quickly – particularly handy for gaming phones such as this with high-refresh-rate screens – but they should look better, too.

Real-world performance 

You only need look at the graphs on the opposite page to see Qualcomm’s claims borne out. And this is with the Matte version of the RedMagic 8 Pro, which comes with 12GB of RAM rather than the 16GB of the Void edition.

It’s impressive to see the RedMagic 8 Pro not only crush the Google Pixel 7 Pro (see issue 339, p72) and Samsung Galaxy S22 (