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Redmagic 12 Pro review: You’ve never gamed on a phone like this before
The Redmagic 12 Pro impresses with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 processor, liquid cooling, a fan, plus a massive 8,400mAh battery to keep the games going for hours and hours.
As I sat in my living room with my family, playing Monster Hunter Outlanders together on the Redmagic 12 Pro, I completely forgot I was playing on a phone. The game looked perfect. It ran at a locked 60FPS and hadn’t dropped frames since I began playing over an hour ago. It just felt like I was back in college, playing Monster Hunter Freedom on my PSP with my friends in the same room.
Most other phones at this point would have throttled hard. What began at 60FPS almost certainly would have been 40FPS tops after 30 minutes or so; the frame drops during heavy fights would have been even worse, but the Redmagic 12 Pro didn’t skip a beat. Even after a solid hour of playing, the battery had only dropped 10%, completely erasing all concerns about using my phone as a gaming console.
This thing is the real deal, and while I’ve used plenty of high-performance phones and gaming phones over the years, none have quite nailed it as this one has. Now, with my Redmagic 12 Pro and my trusty GameSir G8 Galileo, I can game whenever and wherever I want without battery anxiety or thermal problems. Redmagic has gotten really good at this gaming thing.
Sustained gaming performance is difficult to pull off on a phone, which is why the Redmagic 12 Pro features two types of active cooling: a fan and liquid cooling. This design builds on last year’s with a larger liquid cooling system and a more efficient fan. The intake and exhaust vents are on the sides of the phone, not the back, ensuring these shouldn’t get easily blocked. Despite this, the phone is IP68 and IP69 rated.
Most modern phones have huge camera islands that make them awkward to use in controllers, but the Redmagic 12 Pro features a completely flat build that fits perfectly in *any* controller. I don’t usually like overly flat builds, but it actually suits this phone’s purpose.
This should mean the phone does exceedingly well in benchmarks, but I have the distinct feeling the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 processor inside is making that overly difficult. I don’t have any other SD8 Elite Gen 6 phones just yet, but rumor has it that this is one *hot* chipset. I saw the phone hit 50C during testing, so that definitely seems to be the case.
In 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme, a benchmark that stresses ray-tracing performance over 20 minutes, the Redmagic 12 Pro started at 2065 points and ended at 1169 on its last run. That’s a 43% drop in performance over a 20-minute period, which is in line with passively-cooled phones like the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Regardless, the initial performance is nearly double the S26 Ultra, while the 1169 end score matches the S26 Ultra’s best score and is roughly 35% higher than the S26 Ultra’s sustained performance score of around 860.
Actual gaming seemed to fare better in my testing, where I saw sustained performance consistently outperform any Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 phone I have in my possession. When running Wanderstop through the phone’s built-in Steam emulation (more on that soon), the Redmagic 12 Pro averaged 72FPS at the highest settings. Other phones with SD8 Elite Gen 5 processors scored half that, at best. Native Android games like Monster Hunter Outlanders worked even better.
But it’s not just performance that sets this phone apart; it’s the gaming features. Redmagic has fully leaned into the mobile gaming power user angle with its software. Pressing and holding the red button on the right side of the phone launches Gravity X, the built-in game launcher that keeps all your games in one place. It even features an embedded Steam emulator, so all you need to do is sign in with your Steam account and download anything in your library.