Review – REDMAGIC 9S Pro ‘VS’ 9 Pro

We did a full review of the REDMAGIC 9 Pro when it was released in December 2023. Eight months later, REDMAGIC releases the 9 S Pro version.
Behind this “S” is an upgrade of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3chip , which is now a “Leading version” of the chip, and improved cooling.

The CPU is upgraded from 3.3GHz max to 3.4 GHZ max, and the Ardeno 750 graphics chip is upgraded from 770MHz to 1000MHz.

REDMAGIC’s phone has therefore been given an update, but that’s not why the Chinese brand has changed the price. In fact, like its predecessor, it’s available for €649 for the 12GB RAM and 256GB memory version, and €799 for the 16/512GB version.

Since we still have the 9 Pro in our hands, we decided to go head-to-head with the 2 smartphones to check out the performance gains.

Unboxing:

@overclocking.com

Unboxing du nouveau telephone de RedMagic. le 9S Pro est tout simplement le 9Pro avec une meilleur puce. Un must have pour Les joueurs mobile. #redmagic

♬ What Love Is – Zimmer90

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Benchmark:

Let’s start with some benchmarks as we like them.

Antutu v10:

On Antutu v10 the scores are close, with a small -0.6% on the CPU test, 3.6% on the GPU, 4.4% for memory, -3.9% for UX.

3DMark:

On 3DMark, everything is in the green, with around 6% on all scores.

Geekbench 6:

Under Geekbench 6, there’s a 2.5% gain in single-core CPU, but -0.8% in Multi-core. Under Vulkan, the GPU displays a 5.7% perf.

GFXBench:

Now it’s GFXBench’s turn, and the results are mixed, with 1.2% on Car Chase and -1.8% on Manhattan 3.0

BaseMark GPU:

Finally, BaseMarkGPU 1.2 shows us some strange results: 2.4% on simple Vulkan 1, -1.5% on medium Vulkan 1, -6.6% on simple OpenGL 3.1 and -0.5% on medium OpenGL 3.1. Disturbing results when you consider that all the other benchmarks show a big performance gain on the GPU side.

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In Play:

When it comes to gaming, both phones are so powerful that you’ll have to dig deep to find a game that will bring them to their knees. Especially as most cellular games have frame-per-second capping..

Fortnite:

Never mind, after tests on a dozen games. It was Fortnite that allowed us to differentiate them by pushing the settings to the max.

Both phones started at 65 FPS, but after 10 minutes of play, the 9 Pro dropped to 43 FPS. The 9S Pro, on the other hand, never lost FPS, even after 30 minutes of play.
To confirm the test, we did it again, and this time the 9 Pro was running at around 50 FPS, while the new “S” version remained unchanged.

Call of Duty Mobile:

On Call of Duty, we can also see the number of FPS changing noticeably from time to time on version 9 Pro, while the “S” remains very stable at 120 FPS.

Conclusion:

For us, the stability is surely a double effect of the CPU / cooling improvements. Still, this phone is a must-have for any gamer. The triggers are life-changing. The battery is huge. Only the front-facing camera, hidden behind the screen, clearly needs to be improved.