When I reviewed Nubia's Redmagic 7 Pro back in April, I absolutely adored the gaming phone giving it a well-deserved 9/10 in my honest opinion, based specifically on its sheer gaming and emulation abilities. Following that review, Nubia contacted me and offered me the chance to take a look at the 7S Pro with the same gaming slant, and put the upgraded spec through its paces!

Unboxing the Redmagic 7S Pro, you are immediately met with Nubia's signature holographic comic-style box art and impeccable pop-culture styling. Poping the packaging open you find within the standard fare: the main event device itself, a one-meter red USB-C to USB-C charging cable, a two-pin mains plug, and the complimentary silicone skin case. As most people know, when you buy a new phone you always scramble to get a screen protector and case around it to keep it enveloped and as fresh and clean as you can from day one, especially for a phone costing £670, but thankfully Nubia sees fit to supply you with a preinstalled protection film on the screen and that perfect fitting smokey grey silicone cover which is absolutely class!

Visually the 7S Pro is almost identical to the 7 Pro, albeit with this model, I have been sent the Supernova variant, which uses aviation-grade aluminium, has transparent panels revealing the RGB fan, and holographic lines embellishing the rear that gives it a great high-tech look. The middle detailing is daubed with an urban camouflage design which is incredibly superb to behold then the RGB lighting is in full swing. Other colours are available but this one is pretty snazy IMHO!

Internally the 7S Pro brings us Nubias "Armored for Victory" mantra and bolstered hardware that includes a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor that provides 10% more CPU and GPU power with the benefit of 30% less power consumption than the previous Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, ~25% better battery life, and it comes fully loaded with a whopping 18GB of ram and 256/512 storage options.

Tech Specs:

Model: Nubia Redmagic 7S Pro NX709S 5G
Released: Jul 11th, 2022
Dimensions: 166.3 x 77.1 x 10 mm (6.55 x 3.04 x 0.39 in)
RAM options: 12GB / 16GB / 18GB
Storage options: 256GB / 512GB / 1TB (Not expandable)
Display: 6.8" AMOLED, 120Hz, 600 nits
Resolution: 1080 x 2400 pixels, 20:9, 387 ppi CPU: 4nm Octa-core Qualcomm SM8475 Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (4x1.80 GHz Cortex-A510, 3x2.75 GHz Cortex-A710, 1x3.19 GHz Cortex-X2) GPU: Adreno 730
Cameras: 64 MP, f/1.8, 26mm (wide), 1/1.97", 0.7µm, PDAF, 8 MP, f/2.2, 120˚, 13mm (ultrawide), 1/4.0", 1.12µm, 2 MP, f/2.4, (macro), 16 MP Selfie under-display HDR
Sensors: Fingerprint (under display, optical), accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass
Sound: Stereo Loudspeaker, 3.5mm headphone jack, 32-bit/384kHz audio, BT 5.2, A2DP, aptX, LE
Battery: 5000mAh (not removable), Fast charging 65W, PD 3.0
Cooling: RGB rear fan, right-side exhaust
Connectivity: GPS, NFC, Bluetooth 5.2, Dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/6e, USB-C

(The packagings holographic artwork is a thing of beauty by itself)

The notchless 6.8" FHD AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate and 960Hz touch sampling gives you the smoothest experience I have ever witnessed on an Android device. I know that 165Hz displays are now the norm on other handsets, but honestly, 120Hz feels slick and smooth enough right now.

Nubia's Redmagic 7s Pro touts Magic GPU frame Stabilization to end stuttery frame rates in comparison to competitors' handsets, and Magic Boost which increases read and write speeds by up to 30% faster to get your files shared and games installed quicker to get you gaming more swiftly. My question is, will it impact emulated games, or just commercial app store games? We shall see!

Comparatively the 7S Pro is a rather incremental update with an identical form factor, near identical materials, resolutions & frequencies, and only slightly upgraded components. There is no huge paradigm shift here, and no silver bullet for maxed-out benchmarks, let us get that right out the way, as the GPU chipset is still the same Adreno 730.

Notable differences include 12GB - 18GB ram options where there were previously 8GB-18GB versions. There is no longer a 128gb option, only 256GB/512GB/1TB variants. The physical touch-sensitive triggers have had a little upgrade too from 500Hz to 520Hz making them all the more accurate when playing COD or PUBG, etc. The Android 12 OS proprietary interface has been updated from Redmagic OS 5.0 to 5.5 (NX709S_UNCommon_V3.10 at the time of writing), which brings with it a couple of minor UI differences such as capitalisation on certain screen elements, slightly renamed settings titles, and additions to various categories such as Fiber catcher (copy the text to capture game notes in one-click), High definition BT audio (96kHZ) and Lockscreen Wallpapers for example. Gone is the light strip of the 7 Pro and instead we have an RGB effect on the rear fan instead, so the light strip colour settings are absent on the 7S Pro, and there are no RGB tuning options for the RGB fan on the 7S Pro.

The biggest change, technically, is the chipset upgrade from Qualcomm's SM8450 Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, to the SM8475 Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. This means that the performance is increased across most cores with the cluster of 3 hitting 2.75GHz up from 2.50GHz, the quadruple group now at 2.02GHz up from 1.79GHz, and the singular core now clocks 3.19GHz up from 3.00GHz. Boasting an average of 10% better performance, but 30% less power consumption this is not so much of an overhaul to the previous model, more of a refined updated version that simply uses its newer base components more efficiently.

Testing the cameras and modes; they're virtually identical, but somehow the selfie camera on the 7S is slightly worse than that of the 7. For some reason, it appears somewhat more blurry, with slightly less refined image quality. There is one additional app in the "Camera Family" of apps, a document scanner, which is nice and useful for copy documents on the go! Overall the 64 MP camera produces incredibly good images with exceptional colour balance and vibrant detail. Outstanding for portraits, day-light snaps and capturing evening activity, the 7S Pro is exceptional overall with a strong, suitably faithful and realistic representation/reproduction of the colour and lighting at the time the photos were taken.

I also noticed an oddity while testing the camera modes. If you select selfie camera, then instantly select "Camera family" apps the selfie camera section on the screen turns black exposing the camera location. I don't know why it does this, but it actually does this on both the 7 and the 7S. Scrolling through each camera mode in order doesn't show this effect. It's probably just a glitch that I missed in the 7 Pro review and noticed while testing the 7S Pro, but I thought it was funny that given the "notchless" and hidden under-screen camera technology, there was a simple way to visibly coax out the camera.

Testing other apps such as VLC and running a couple of movies and TV shows across a network, and running Movie player apps on 4G/5G, the picture and sound quality are virtually identical again to the 7 Pro, and therefore it is still superb for media playback on wifi or on the move. While the sound remains a little tinny from the speakers (though you could easily pair a BT headset with this instead), watching movies on this is an enjoyable experience throughout, with no notable video distortions, ghosting, lagging or discolouration; perfect for travelling with!

(Side-by-side of the 7 Pro and 7S Pro respectively)

COD Mobile, PUBG, and Asphalt 9 Legends all run seamlessly and smoothly, as you would expect, and with the now standard gaming triggers the games feel far more like you're playing on a portable console, not just on a phone. With the 120Hz refresh rate and 960hz touch sampling the screen is incredibly responsive and swiping directions is effortless to steer and scope around quickly and accurately, though onscreen buttons, as opposed to physical buttons, will never prevail for hardcore gamers purely because they simply aren't tactile. I have to admit that using a Bluetooth controller and grip stand, such as the Moga XP5-X, is still my favourite way to play when not just having a lunchtime casual session.

The Redmagic gaming modes are all here too and with a flip of the dedicated red switch the phone morphs into the titular mode allowing you to launch titles or add or remove games to the selection as you see fit. Gone from the fore is the carousel, and now there is a less flashy yet more streamlined thumbnail app selector that feels more suited to searching through your apps with greater speed and less swiping. Once the games or apps are chosen, they automatically trigger gaming modes RGB fan to ramp up and daemons turn on, giving you a clean system mode that keeps everything in the background from interfering or disturbing you, The thermals are also controlled nicely thanks to the exhaust, whilst playing. Sure it's louder, but it is really not that bad, and from what I saw of the temperatures; it definitely works a treat!

(The plug-in library allows in-game customisation and tweaking, great for FPS title and you can use the shorthand system to layer notes on your game for hints and tips!)

Benchmarking this upgraded 7S Pro set up I recorded a CPU single core of 1349 (1351 game mode), and a multicore score of 4268 (4281 game mode). Compared to the 7 Pros 1249 single and 3864 multi, it's a solid 10% increase as stated in the marketing for the device. Compute benchmarks for OpenCL scored 6521 (6630 game mode), and Vulkan 7200 (7522 game mode) for the 7S Pro, compared to the 7 Pros OpenCL avg score of 6142 and an avg Vulkan score of 8617 indicates an average of  7.6% increase on OpenCL but interestingly a 12% decrease on Vulkan. I ran these tests a couple of times and notably, the 7S Pro scored lower on Sobel, Histogram Equalization, Depth of field, and SFFT versus the 7 Pro. In real terms, this doesn't mean that the 7S is worse off, it just means there is perhaps a slight bottleneck on certain workloads that affects the benchmarking test results more than actual in-game performance would be hit.

For emulation however, I noticed that running Super Mario Galaxy side by side on Dolphin there were more notable frame drops on the 7S Pro compared to the 7 Pro. This was running the same version of Dolphin, the same WBFS file of EU SMG2 and running both in their respective game modes with the fan on full (Game Assist vs Redmagic force). At first, they ran perfectly in sync but on the intro menu where it says "Press A and B" to start the game, you will note some slowdown each cycle of the intro music, which quickly puts them out of unison with the 7S Pro running behind consistently. Testing clean configs and identical settings the same was true repeatedly for running Dolphin with other games too, in my opinion, the 7S Pro does not beat the 7 Pro in this testing scenario. Citra was a similar story, with the game Zelda A Link Between Worlds loading dramatically faster on the 7S (seemingly fewer items to cache 993 on the 7S vs 1240 on the 7) but the framerate clearly suffering more but running slightly faster than that of the 7, so both effectively running the same speed, and both crashing periodically due to the emulator, not the hardware.

AetherSX2 is a fantastic emulator for PS2 on the go, but again I feel that the performance is somehow better on the 7 than on the 7S. I made sure to use the same version APK, no patches, vanilla settings, and I loaded up the same version of the same iso at the same time. Reading the CPU/GPU info whilst running Tekken Tag Tournament intro I could see a GPU difference of 1.2% vs 2.7% usage during cut scenes and a similar doubling of 20% vs 42% in-game. There is a definite fluctuation on the speed side of things too, with the 7 Pro holding an almost solid 98-104% throughout attract mode, but the 7S Pro dips and accelerates around the 89-104% far more frequently. EE, GS and VU hold virtually parallel results, so they aren't worth noting. This isn't to say that the game is unplayable, not by any stretch, it's just that the performance rate on the 7S is, for some reason, more erratic than on the 7.

It's a similar story on The Simpsons Hit and Run running the same vanilla set-up defaults. The GPU is operating at a little over twice the intensity on the 7S Pro than it is on the 7. 10.6% on the 7 vs 22.4% on the 7S, 1.2% in the running demo vs 3.3% on the 7S. The frame rate fluctuates more on the 7S again, but the game maintains perfect synchronicity when played side by side. Why is the GPU working so much harder on the 7S? Is it the zero-throttling? I'm not sure it is entirely working as well as it could be, given how the 7 Pro performs but I'm no technical expert on these matters.

Thermals-wise the chipset seems to idle about 1.5 degrees lower than the 7 Pro, the battery seems to idle some 2 degrees cooler on average and the voltage is reduced from 8789 mV on the 7 Pro down to 7576 mV on the 7S Pro. After some gaming, I noted a 3-degree difference on the 7S compared to the 7, meaning the new chipset and ICE 10 cooling is definitely keeping the system running cooler when pushed for long periods of time. That's definitely one clear win for the 7S Pro!

I think the updated hardware certainly loads files faster, marginally, but overall fails to run emulated games, even comparably, to its predecessor. I had hoped for a little performance boost, or at least identical frame rates with enhanced file loading times, but this doesn't appear to be the case. Perhaps it's the Redmagic force, frame stability, and magic boost combination coming a cropper, but something doesn't add up. Maybe everything put in place to prevent speed loss with zero-throttling is, ironically, producing a slight speed loss when put in the situation of running emulated hardware, as in all other situations, it performs just as well as the 7 Pro. I have no doubt the 7S runs cooler, more efficiently and uses less battery, however, the comparison is clear for me as an emulation enthusiast. On each front, pushing emulation to the latest and greatest, or rather the hardest to emulate on an Android phone, the 7S Pro seems to yield ever so slightly lower results across the board in practice. This could probably be ironed out in software, perhaps in the Redmagic OS 5.5, or through tweaking something in the Neo AI system daemons that monitor and control all those intelligent systems in the background, because the GPU is the same, and the CPU is clocked higher, so why else would it perform worse?

Personally the NX709J Pro still holds my top spot for performance in emulation, so if you were considering an upgrade, it comes down to battery life and efficiency over raw power specifically for getting your power-hungry retro gaming fix on the move.

Product Link:

https://uk.redmagic.gg/pages/redmagic-7s-pro