What I learned gaming on the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6

Ever since its announcement back in September, I’ve been dying to get my hands on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 processor. The chip boasts a colossal 5GHz CPU clock speed, 16MB Oryon Flex Cache, and a new Adreno GPU that should make it an absolute powerhouse for the latest games, emulators, and even native ports.

To get hands-on with Qualcomm’s latest chip, I’ve spent a weekend with the new REDMAGIC 12 Pro. It’s a powerhouse gaming smartphone sporting Qualcomm’s latest chip, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM on my model (or a more affordable 12GB model with 256GB of storage), a 185Hz 6.85-inch OLED display, and a huge 8,400mAh battery. The handset also sports an improved dual-loop liquid cooling system and a 25,500 RPM cooling fan to keep the high-end chipset in check, along with shoulder triggers and a familiar assortment of gaming-oriented software tweaks.

Raw benchmarks for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and its Extreme variant are already shaping up to break new records in the Android space. The REDMAGIC 12 Pro confirms Qualcomm’s earlier reference results, and its cooling setup ensures the phone delivers sustained performance that even outlasts the latest iPhone 18 Pro Max — our current benchmark topper.

However, stress test results show extremely high temperatures on the REDMAGIC 12 Pro, with internal and external temperatures exceeding 58°C. That’s worryingly hot, making the phone uncomfortable to hold. Not to mention a worrying sign for battery health. But before we jump on the Snapdragon overheating bandwagon, we should look at the bigger picture and real-world performance results as well.

Thankfully, real-world games don’t push the phone anywhere near this hard, or perhaps I should say that REDMAGIC takes a more balanced approach to thermals when it’s not trying to top the benchmark charts. With that in mind, let’s get into some results with the phone.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 gaming test

To get to grips with just how performant the REDMAGIC 12 Pro and its new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 processor are, I turned to my usual rotation of demanding Android games. There’s the fast-paced Asphalt Legends, with high-end graphical effects and a maximum frame rate of up to 120fps. Similarly, Call of Duty: Mobile’s Battle Royale mode has a smooth 120fps cap at medium graphics settings, paired with a larger open world, which places greater stress on the GPU and memory. Finally, Genshin Impact remains one of the most popular and demanding open-world Android games on the market. It has a lower 60fps target, but setting the graphics to maximum is still a litmus test for modern GPUs.

Before getting to the results, I encountered a small software quirk when booting up Asphalt Legends. Despite setting the in-game frame rate to 120, the REDMAGIC 12 Pro locked to just 60fps and seemed to throttle performance quite aggressively. However, flicking REDMAGIC’s refresh rate to 120 in Game Space unlocked the desired performance level. I didn’t need to repeat this with the other games I tested.

The new chipset handles these games without issue, locking very tightly to the maximum possible frame rate across all three. Outside of the odd menu transition, there’s nothing approaching significant frame drops in any of these titles, with the average and 5% lows tracking together very near the desired frame rate.

But there are two important things to note here in addition to raw frame rates. There is the odd jank detected in COD: Mobile and Genshin Impact. Nothing approaching a very noticeable 200ms, but the frame rates aren’t entirely locked rock-solid at 120fps or 60fps. This could be because I wasn’t running the tests in REDMAGIC’s high-performance mode, instead opting for the default option that balances performance and power draw. There’s more performance on the table that could lock these frame rates a little tighter, in theory, but I left the phone as the default because, presumably, that’s what REDMAGIC thinks is best.

Perhaps more importantly, there’s very little temperature increase across all three tests. The phone remained below a cool 35°C in the worst case (Genshin Impact), and the fan doesn’t even need to kick in to keep the handset cool. It appears the stress test result was nothing to worry about. Even after 20 minutes straight playing COD: Mobile, the maximum external temperature on the back of the phone was just 34.3°C — barely warm to the touch. This doesn’t mean the fan won’t kick in during even longer sessions, running emulators, or in warmer climates than a chilly UK autumn, but it at least indicates that chip overheating isn’t a problem.

To test and stress the phone and chipset a little more, I turned to some of the classically demanding emulators out there — Dolphin for the GameCube and Wii, and NetherSX2 for the PlayStation 2. Normally, I race through a lap of Mario Kart Wii, but the emulator kept crashing regardless of whether I used OpenGL or Vulkan. Clearly, there are some driver issues that need sorting out, which is always a risk when buying a brand-new phone for emulation. Still, F-Zero GX and Need for Speed: Most Wanted booted up and ran without issue.

It’s still difficult to obtain flawless performance in these titles, particularly when emulating demanding PlayStation 2 games, but the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 gives it a very good try. Dolphin running OpenGL can deliver a virtually flawless 60fps in F-Zero GX, aside from the odd menu hitch. That’s exactly what you want for a fast-paced racing game. Equally impressive is that the pair comes very close to averaging 60fps in Need for Speed, which remains one of the toughest games I’ve come across to run smoothly. A 56fps average with 5% lows above 45fps is very playable and a modest improvement over last year’s phones.

It’s interesting that Vulkan performance is marginally worse for both titles, but that could be another indication of less-than-ideal drivers at this early stage of the game. Still, both games remain playable even when switching the rendering API.

After spending a few more hours with the phone, the key takeaway is obviously that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 packs more performance than you’re likely to ever need for current-generation titles and emulators. In fact, it has enough performance to spare for the next generation of games, emulators, and native ports, ensuring your phone has the headroom to keep up for years to come.

That said, last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 already locked down the demanding Android games I tested at the very same frame rates. You certainly don’t have to upgrade to Qualcomm’s latest chip to get the very best out of today’s games, but that isn’t to say the Gen 6 doesn’t have its perks.

Accounting for the display and Wi-Fi, the REDMAGIC 12 Pro still reported a power draw of less than 6W when running these games. The exception was emulating Need for Speed via OpenGL, which saw reported power consumption meander between 6W and 9W, indicating that the phone was working much harder to render at a high frame rate in this test. Still, this bodes well for both temperatures and battery life, ensuring that this year’s added performance headroom doesn’t come at a huge increase in power consumed.

In fact, paired with the phone’s cutting-edge 8,400mAh battery, endurance sees a serious uplift. My entire gaming test session lasted around three and a half hours, and during that time, the phone’s battery capacity dropped by only about 25%. In theory, I could have kept playing for 12 hours straight and still had a little juice left in the tank.

The good news is that reports of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 running hot don’t manifest here, at least not in real workloads. However, the fact that running the chip at full throttle during stress tests produces extremely high temperatures remains a concern and suggests that hitting peak performance for any length of time is increasingly unrealistic for regular smartphones with less robust cooling systems.

In my week with the phone, I also tried running the REDMAGIC 12 Pro as a daily driver, and there’s promise as well as familiar caveats. For starters, the colossal 8,400mAh battery isn’t just amazing for gaming; REDMAGIC has done an impressive job optimizing performance not just for gameplay but also for multi-day use in regular tasks. The phone excels in our web and media capture tests, outlasting mainstream flagships by a significant margin.

The phone is also pretty quick to charge back up when you need it. It supports USB PD PPS with a 20V-compatible plug, delivering just over 70W of power to charge the phone from nearly empty to full in around 75 minutes. That’s not too bad, and rivals flagship phones with far smaller battery capacities. For a daily driver, the core needs are well met.

Still, I’m certainly not saying the REDMAGIC 12 Pro offers the same depth of features and everyday tools you’ll find in the likes of Google’s Pixel or Samsung’s One UI; the software experience remains fine-tuned around gaming optimizations and is otherwise rather barebones and ad-riddled in places. Likewise, the camera experience remains as basic as it’s ever been, and while EU customers receive five years of OS updates, the rest of the world may receive only two OS updates and three years of security patches. That’s terrible by modern flagship standards. Still, tools like Host Mode for connecting and playing games on your PC, Steam Workshop support and achievement displays, and resolution and frame rate upscaling make this a gaming experience that’s a cut above what’s available on your humdrum flagship smartphones.

If you’re looking for a phone that’ll last all day and you spend plenty of hours gaming every week, the REDMAGIC 12 Pro might be a solid investment. Prices start at $949 for the 12GB/256GB configuration, rising to $1,199 if you need 16GB of RAM and a whopping 1TB of storage for all your games, letting you get your hands on bleeding-edge hardware for a little less than the mainstream competition.