On the first working day of 2024, we received a brand new third-generation Snapdragon 8 flagship phone, although the pace of this phone's announcement seems to be a bit slower compared to the friends who rushed to release it in the fall/winter of last year, but this time it brings us unprecedented AI gaming assistance innovations, which is the ROG Gaming Phone 8 Pro. next, let's see how this first flagship new product of the 2024, Let's see how this first flagship gaming smartphone
Appearance and design
First of all, the box, ROG once again back to the six-pronged design, the surface of the iconic "big eyes" logo and ROG letters Logo, and both logos are used in the dot pattern design, seems to be hinting at the appearance of the design.
The words 08 and ROG Phone are also printed on the lower left corner of the front of the package, and the packaging is a magnetic design, which can be opened by pinching and pulling down the small red tab on the front of the package.
The package is still very rich in accessories, the entire interior space is stuffed to the brim, in addition to the phone itself, there are 65W dual C-port fast charging adapter, Dual Type-C-port nylon braided cable, black hollowed out case, customized metal card pin, new Aeroactive Cooler X and back clip storage bag, the process of unpacking is very enjoyable.
The ROG Phone 8 Pro's back case design has been overhauled, and in order to make the body thinner and lighter, the official size and weight have been reduced from the previous generation's thickness of 10.49mm to 8.9mm, the shape is more slender, and the weight has been reduced from the previous generation's 246g to 225g.
In terms of styling, the ROG Phone 8 Pro is a standard straight phone + straight screen design, and the back part of the case is treated with AG glass technology, which feels as delicate and smooth as what was previously known as "Silk Glass". The left and right sides of the back shell made a certain waist transition processing, enhance the grip feeling.
This time, ROG did not use cool decorative elements and open window sub-screen, but in the lower part of the back shell with AnimeVision light display matrix screen. Instead, the AnimeVision Matrix Display is used in the lower part of the case. The screen, in fact, the entire light-emitting part of the screen is hidden underneath the case, and the surface is completely invisible. The built-in "screen" is actually 341 Mini LED beads, and through the change of their brightness, it displays a variety of dynamic patterns, very personalized and stunning effect.
When you open the Smart Control Center, you can see the applications that Matrix Lighting is suited for, such as the ROG logo in standby, incoming calls, notifications, charging, gaming, music, taking photos and recording videos, and more.
In addition, ROG has designed at least two animation styles for each scenario, and in some cases as many as six, which can be customized by hand or by importing external files, making it highly playable.
The lens section of the ROG Phone 8 Pro has also changed quite a bit. Instead of a long strip design, it's been replaced with an irregular rectangle, and the lens module is divided into two layers, with a larger main camera lens, and an ultra wide-angle lens and telephoto lens on the right side.
Coming to the screen part, the ROG Phone 8 Pro this time narrowed the upper and lower bezels, making a narrow-bezel full-screen with four visually equal widths on all sides, centered on the hole-dug front lens, with a screen-to-body ratio of up to 94%, and the edges of the screen made a micro-arc treatment.
The screen chin is a little bit wider, but the overall appearance is not too big. Recognition program for the under-screen ultra-thin optical fingerprint, the position is relatively upward, the unlocking experience is good.
Parameters, this is a piece of Samsung E6 substrate, 1080P resolution 6.78-inch AMOLED flexible straight screen, with a 165Hz refresh rate and 1 to 120Hz LTPO adaptive refresh rate adjustment, 1600nit global brightness, 2500nit peak brightness, the screen display quality does not have to worry about at all.
The ROG Phone 8 Pro features a dual-stereo speaker system with an upper earpiece-cum-speaker and a separate lower speaker port, as well as an "extremely advanced" 3.5mm headphone jack at the bottom of the case.
Bezels The ROG Phone 8 Pro has a straight metal frame, but the edges of the screen and the rear casing have curved transitions. The right side frame retains the AirTriggers shoulder buttons on the top and bottom edges, while the volume buttons, power button, and pickup microphone are in the center.
The left side of the bezel is cleaner, with only a center USB-C port for charging the phone while gaming in a cross grip, and an external Aeroactive Cooler X. There are also a good number of antennas on the bezel, and thanks to the redesigned body, the ROG Phone 8 Pro is the first ROG gaming phone to support IP68 dust and water resistance.
The ROG Phone 8 Pro also comes with Aeroactive Cooler X as standard, which is smaller in size but has all the classic features of its predecessors, such as a push-button bayonet switch, dual left and right back buttons, a storage bracket at the bottom, and a fan + semiconductor cooling in one design.
Once the Aeroactive Cooler X is installed on the phone, the RGB acrylic strip on the top back lights up, and gamers can set the light effects through the Smart Control Center, as well as unlock the exclusive X+ Performance Mode and Freeze Cooling Mode.
Hardware and Performance
Compared to previous years' ROG gaming phones, this year's ROG focuses more on thermal tuning and optimization in terms of performance. After all, the mainstream flagship phones use the third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, which makes it a lot easier to cope with today's most performance-demanding handheld games, and the performance is not the same as that of the other ROG phones.
IT home from the ROG official learned that this year ROG Phone 8 Pro adopts a new matrix liquid cooling architecture, and the previous center motherboard program is different, this time ROG found a new way of heat conduction, they punched holes in the motherboard and customized a specially designed copper column, the center of the motherboard on the SoC heat is quickly conducted to the back cover, and also avoided the lateral grip, hands grip the phone and operate the screen area, so whether it's a cell phone or a cell phone, it's not a good idea to use it. It also avoids the area where the hands grip the phone and operate the screen when holding it horizontally, so there is no noticeable heat in the actual operation of either the back cover or the screen.
So how does this new cooling architecture work? Before we get to the answer, let's take a look at the ROG Phone 8 Pro's performance release with the usual scores and games. First up is the latest 10.1.8 version of AnTuTu, and the ROG Phone 8 Pro scored 2256223 points when it was in "X Mode", which is the most powerful mode for non-external cooling clips, and it's at the level of a flagship gaming phone.
It should be noted that the temperature monitoring graph below the AnTuTuTu score shows that the battery temperature at the beginning of the run was at 31.1°, and soon after the run, it rose to the peak of 40.5°, and then fluctuated slightly around 40°. Considering the fact that IT House has already turned on the heat in the office area, it's normal for the battery temperature to be like this, but this puts a higher demand on the ROG Phone 8 Pro's heat dissipation, and once too much heat builds up internally and it can't be dissipated efficiently, downclocking becomes inevitable, so the current office environment in the north is a bit of a sidebar for the ROG Phone 8 Pro.
Next is the main event, 3D Mark stress test, from here on the difficulty, we ran the 3D Mark mobile version of the Wide Life Stress Test and Extreme Stress Test in turn, mainstream flagship phones in this section, 20 rounds of score cycle can not be stabilized in a straight line, the cycle curve will be a curved downward trend, in general, some of the phones in the first test upper limit score can only reach 1.6W, the lower part of the test, the upper part of the test is only 1.6W, the lower part of the test is only 1.6W, the lower part of the test is only 1.6W. The ROG Phone 8 Pro is a gaming phone, after all, the 20 rounds of the two tests are basically a straight line, and I have to admire the engineers.
So how does it perform in real-world gaming? Let's go straight to the "Mihayu Performance Test Suite", in the game "Original God", we choose the highest quality, the number of hair is the standard 720P, ROG Phone 8 Pro X mode, 30 minutes of Fontaine underwater exploration, the whole process does not teleportation, the encounter monster to fight.
In the end, the ROG Phone 8 Pro averaged 60.8 fps, with a steady straight line frame rate curve. There were some minor fluctuations during gameplay, with the frame rate dropping as low as 46 fps, but the process was very smooth, so it didn't affect the gaming experience at all.
If the frame rate is so stable, what about the temperature? As you can see from the results of the temperature measuring instrument, the highest temperature on the back of the ROG Phone 8 Pro is 41.2°, and the highest temperature on the front is 42°, with the high temperatures concentrated in the middle area of the front and back, while the average temperature of the edge handgrip area is only 33-34°, which is a perfect testament to the internal heat dissipation design of the ROG Phone 8 Pro this time around.
In terms of power consumption, the ROG Phone 8 Pro averaged 5.59W in ProtoGods games, with maximum and minimum values of 7.88W and 4.28W respectively, which is a bit more aggressive than the third generation Snapdragon 8 flagships that are already on the market.
In terms of CPU core scheduling, the ROG Phone 8 Pro runs the small cores at around 1200MHz, the large cores at around 1800MHz, and the super-large cores at 1800MHz for a while to reach a high of 2707MHz, before dropping back down and stabilizing at 2150MHz, making for a clear division of labor in terms of overall core scheduling.
Speaking of which, I believe you should have noticed that the ROG Phone 8 Pro does not further enhance the resolution of the "Original God" game through the current mainstream solo chip solution, nor does it have any frame-interpolation technology, as a gaming cell phone, has the optimization of the ROG in the AI and gaming hardware algorithms stopped here?
Old fans know, ROG as a gaming phone positioning, since its birth has made a lot of functional innovations for the gaming experience, many features until today still in the experience of the leading. For example, the fan power supply and charging interface on the side of the fuselage, bypassing the battery to the motherboard direct power supply bypass charging, App Live Mode, Alignment Assist, AirTriggers Ultrasonic Pressure Sensitive Shoulder Keys, etc., all of these to the core of the handheld game to the player to bring a different gaming experience, in the previous issue of the ROG gaming cell phone review I have repeatedly introduced, so in the gaming experience innovation, ROG has always been not the same. has never been shy about innovation in the gaming experience.
This time around, the ROG Phone 8 Pro utilizes the powerful AI algorithms of the third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, naturally bringing more practical and tricky innovations to gamers. For example, when we open the game toolbar in ProtoGods, there's a new Smart Tips feature on the right side of the game, which may seem like an ordinary name, but there's a lot more to it than just clicking on it.
After clicking on it, there are 4 options in total, the first one is auto pickup which can help us to automatically pick up plants, insects and other collectibles on the side of the road during the process of exploring and fighting in the big world, as well as the materials dropped after manually opening treasure chests or defeating monsters. The second running lock is equivalent to turning on the auto-running state, and the player only needs to control the sprint, skill release buttons, or rotate the view angle individually through the right hand, which is simply a boon for the Liverpool party.
The third and fourth are also very powerful, a lot of original God players have complained about the original God can not skip the plot dialog, if you do not want to see the plot with the hand has been pointing is very torturous, although the game makers have their own considerations to do so, but ROG is still from their own point of view as much as possible to help improve the game experience of the party of the players to skip, that is, automatically accelerate the dialogue. And release control, which is equivalent to reduce the character by the control skills or elemental reaction after the stiff time, after IT home test each function can be triggered smoothly, players do not have to worry about.
There are also shortcut control functions, players can customize some shortcut function buttons on the game interface, press and use, such as recording screen / screenshot.
Moreover, the size, transparency and position of each shortcut button can be adjusted at will, almost perfectly hitting the pain point needs of people such as handheld game masters, game strategy bloggers and liver players, which is a very obvious improvement in efficiency. There aren't a lot of customization options yet, but I'm sure this feature will become more and more powerful as it's refined.
I believe that we have all encountered such a problem, in the "Original God" of the big world exploration mission or branch line mission, by the puzzle stuck in an embarrassing situation, this time we need to manually enter the mission title, mission description in the B station, Shake voice and other platforms to find video, graphic strategy, in many cases also have to use the brain to organize the language, the degree of tediousness can be imagined. But to our surprise, the ROG Phone 8 Pro gaming phone gives us a brand new solution.
ROG directly in the game toolbar to add a screen recognition function, although others have, but it is not the same logic of operation, others are automatically recognized box, ROG is to let you manually box the text you need and automatically recognized, but also thoughtfully attached to the name of the game, the player can copy the text can be selected can also be directly opened to jump to the web page to search for, to find the strategy is very convenient to do not want to.
The screen recognition function can also select a specific language, so that the practicality and accuracy of recognition in mixed language scenarios and foreign games is also further improved. It looks like nothing special, but it is a real flavor because few players will be able to use or actively use the screen recognition function in the game.
I have to say, ROG in the game in the ease of use of the function of digging and acumen is really something, ordinary players encounter inconvenience, can only put up with or abandon the pit, or is to give the game manufacturer advice or online voice, hoping that the game manufacturer to solve these problems. ROG is the opposite, I give you a good optimization at the same time, pinpointing the proportion of the hangover-like experience but does not disrupt the balance of the game, does not damage the interests of the manufacturer. All the player has to do is to take advantage of these small innovations and make them work for him or her as much as possible to maximize the comfort of the gaming experience. For example, if I can easily catch butterflies with one hand after I turn on run-lock and auto-pickup, can't I do the same with crystal butterflies?
Coming back to game performance, a 20-minute StarCraft Sea Hub run in the more game-loaded Wipeout: StarDome Railroad with the highest quality selected resulted in a solid straight line frame rate curve with even less fluctuation, and a final average of 60.9 fps. So what's the cost?
Power consumption and surface temperatures, of course. Average power consumption rose further to 6.68W and maximum power consumption to 8.38W, while the maximum temperature in the center area of the phone's front and back surfaces was 47°, but only 36° in the area where the phone is held in the hands and operated by the fingers on both sides, which is where the cooling clip that comes with the device comes into play.
With the cooling fan on, the system automatically switched to X+ mode when we entered the game and selected the third level of Cooling Mode for a 20-minute run through Crackdown: Star Vault Railroad's Star Crouch Sea, where we could see that the flat power consumption was already at 9.64W due to the external cooling fan, but the average frame rate was higher, at 61 fps. The maximum surface temperature has also dropped significantly to around 38°, and can be further reduced in the more extreme Freeze mode if the fan is connected to an external power supply.
Image Performance
In addition to strong gaming performance, the ROG Phone 8 Pro also gets a video upgrade this time around.
The ROG Phone 8 Pro adopts the mainstream triple-camera solution on flagship phones this time, with a 50-megapixel Sony IMX890 flagship CMOS for the main camera, a 1/1.56-inch outsole, f/1.9 aperture, and support for 6-axis anti-shake Hybrid PTZ 3.0 technology. On the top right is a 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens with a free-form lens and 120° wide angle. The lower right lens is a 32-megapixel telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom. Let's take a look at the sample photos to see how it performs.
First of all, the performance of the ultra-wide-angle lens, the ROG camera comes with a wide-angle zoom magnification of 0.7x instead of 0.6x, we opened the full-screen photo ratio shot Qingdao Olympic Sailing Center, the venue is too large, we can not get a full shot of the back of the railing, but the ultra-wide-angle effect of the ROG Phone 8 Pro is still very good, the colors of the sky and the architectural glass is very reproducible, and the venue under the eaves of the light and dark relationship is also very well expressed. The relationship between light and darkness under the eaves of the venue is also very well expressed, not a dead black, and the light and shadow atmosphere of the sun shining from the right side is also perfectly reproduced, which expresses the magnificence and atmosphere of the whole building.
When we changed the ratio of the photo to 4:3 to take a picture of the cruise ship docked at the shore, the glass of the buildings in the distance was reflected by the sunlight, and the flagpole, which is only used for welcoming the guests and hoisting the flag during the festivals, was also slightly golden by the sunlight, which is obviously backlighting the photo, so the sky was also slightly whitened by the sunlight, but the colors were still accurate in principle.
The ROG Phone 8 Pro's clarity at 3x zoom is not bad at all, and the texture and reflections of the glass on the building's exterior walls are very well expressed. And here's a detail: since the sun is on the other side of the sea and there are towering trees on the road opposite the buildings, the sky is significantly darker here, and there aren't a lot of clouds, and the overall color is slightly bluish, but to the naked eye it's almost white.
In this shot of the cruise ship through the observation deck, we backlit the shot at an angle of 45°, so the sky is whitened, and the colors and details of the cruise ship are preserved. For example, the bow of the ship is bluish from the glass of the building in the distance, and the back of the ship is slowly turning to white as it should be.
Telephoto lenses are also important indoors, such as in this area with complex lighting and neon signs all over the place, and the ROG Phone 8 Pro not only does a good job of suppressing the highlights of the signs, but also doesn't darken the darker parts of the store's walls and the right-hand top, although the ROG Phone 8 Pro's choice of a more realistic hair color in terms of color isn't as pleasing to the eye as the saturated-toned photos.
Finally, the main camera performs, and in this set of scenes with complex lighting in the mall, the ROG Phone 8 Pro produces very clear photos that don't give the impression of oversharpening, while the atmosphere of the mall is also restored.
However, in the well-lit outdoor, good weather conditions with the main camera to shoot photos in color is still more pleasing to the eye, as can be seen from the left side of the building in the distance, at this time the sea has been illuminated by the sun white, as if covered with a layer of fog, we avoid this part of the shoot to the right, the sky is obviously bluer, the boat mottled traces of the texture of the hemp rope is clearly visible, the entire process of shooting, regardless of the use of which lens shooting are No matter which lens is used, the whole process is not muddy, and the capture is very easy.
Conclusion
The overall impression of the ROG Phone 8 Pro is that it feels thinner and lighter, has a more personalized appearance, is full of innovative gaming features, and has better imaging capabilities. Overall, the ROG Phone 8 Pro's upgrades and innovations in multiple dimensions have improved its overall product power significantly. If the ROG Phone 8 Pro can continue to dip in price this time, the experience will undoubtedly be transcendent in the gaming phone category.
Electronics
Of course, what impresses me most is the ROG Phone 8 Pro's gaming interaction innovation with the chip's AI performance. Nowadays, a lot of manufacturers are working on the frame interpolation chip of the unique display, but the difference between the calculated picture and the effect generated by the DLSS frames on the graphics card is still very obvious, which can't be comparable to the native high scoring quality, and it has the side effect of having a more and more marginal effect the further the game goes. ROG Phone 8 Pro with AI algorithms to achieve the game assist function, not only to improve the game experience, but also no side effects, fully tapped the potential of the Snapdragon chip, it can be said that in terms of innovation in game functions, ROG is still the king. In the future, I hope that ROG can "optimize" the front lens, make the body thinner and lighter, and bring players a more extreme gaming experience.
Now come to vopmart.com, buy ROG Phone 8 Series Gaming Phone and Accessories .
