On Monday, Redmagic finally offered details of its Redmagic 11 Pro gaming phone. The big defining feature is its use of liquid cooling—a technology you often see on desktop PCs. Most modern phones use passive heat transfer through pipes and, in more expensive devices, a vapor chamber to spread heat evenly across a larger surface area. Liquid cooling, instead, uses a micropump to swirl fluorinated cooling fluid on the phone’s baseplate, then delivers it to a fan that blasts the heat away.
Two years ago, OnePlus showed off a concept phone with similar technology, and it’s finally here—in a device you can actually buy. Along with its own R4 thermal management chip, the Redmagic 11 Pro will sport the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip. When benchmarking the chip myself on a reference phone with juiced specs, I observed the device beginning to degrade over the course of many minutes, which had me concerned that the chip was overheating and limiting performance over a long session. Redmagic promises its semiconductors will enable optimal performance, even outside in temperatures ranging from -40 to 70 degrees Celsius (or -40 to 158 degrees Fahrenheit).
We have not seen Redmagic’s latest in action, so we can’t say how effective its liquid cooling solution would be compared to what will eventually come to the next Samsung Galaxy device. At the very least, it sports a 144Hz screen, so it should be able to present your games in their best light. Redmagic’s phone is coming to the United States, though not through any carrier. You’ll need to pony up $750 for the base model; $850 nets a transparent glass back to show you the liquid cooling in action.
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What’s even more interesting is the possibility that we could finally get frame generation on mobile devices. OnePlus is bringing that closer to reality with its HyperRendering GPU pipeline.
The company said this would make rendering more efficient and open up interesting possibilities for game frame rates. That includes some kind of frame generation, sometimes called frame interpolation, which inserts AI-generated frames between frames rendered by the chip itself. Nvidia uses this technology on its latest GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs to stick up to 4x as many AI frames in between rendered frames. While it’s less impactful on a full-blown gaming PC, the technology could prove more potent on a smaller, cheaper device like a phone.
ARM, the company behind most modern mobile chip architecture, has promised us the possibility of AI upscaling to push better frame rates, so in the mobile space, we’re seeing a whole slew of new technology that could technically push gaming harder than before. The only problem there is the lack of major releases that make these devices enticing enough for anybody not already addicted to Honkai Star Rail to consider. At this point, companies are simply proving there are still ways to innovate in the mobile space. With enough pressure, maybe gamers could one day see a new Samsung, Google, or Apple device that won’t bore them to tears.
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