Aside from being the phone with the fastest charging speed commercially available at 240w, the realme GT3 positions itself as a flagship killer, boasting a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor and UFS 3.1 storage. While it does not use the latest flagship chip from Qualcomm, the GT3 should be able to offer flagship-like performance–and not worry about throttling during heavy loads. To see if this is true, we subjected to the realme GT3 to a stress test, where we ran a benchmark multiple times and played demanding games for a prolonged period.

 

Testing conditions

For this test, we are using a 16GB/256GB version of the GT3 and ran the test in a non-airconditioned room with a temperature of approximately 27 degrees Celsius. For our two test games–Asphalt 9 and Genshin Impact–we set the graphics and FPS to the highest possible, and play through resource-intensive scenarios for at least 10 minutes. All metrics for the gaming test are measured using GameBench.

 

Synthetic Stress Test

3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme Stress test is one of the best synthetic benchmarks to determine a phone’s performance under sustained loads. This test runs for around 20 minutes and runs 20 loops of Wild Life Extreme.

Through the Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, the realme GT3 was able to sustain its performance until the 19th loop, where performance throttled from 20FPS on average to 8FPS. This also brought down the score from 2720 to 1699.

Regarding temperature, the GT3 peaked at around 45 degrees Celsius and managed to maintain a consistent performance. The decline in performance is evident towards the end of the test–where the GT3’s temperature was around 45 degrees and started to throttle performance until the temperature went down to normal and optimal levels.

It’s also worth noting that the GT3 reached 40 degrees Celsius around midway through the stress test, which is expected for a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor–the results are much worse with the non-Plus version, which is why realme made a good choice to use the Plus version for its 2023 flagship killer.

Gaming Stress Test

Why synthetic benchmarks are a good indicator of how a phone performs, actual gameplay brings over a clearer picture of how it performs under heavy loads. For our gaming stress test, we ran both Genshin Impact and Asphalt 9 on their highest possible settings and played through each game for at least 10 minutes.

For Genshin Impact, we played through a single run of the Spiral Abyss end-game content, where the challenge was to clear a certain amount of enemy mobs as fast as possible. Based on the results we obtained from GameBench, the realme GT3 was able to consistently sustain 60FPS throughout the whole gameplay at 96%, only dropping frames as we entered another part of the Sprial Abyss run. While the GT3 became slightly warm during the session, it was still comfortable to hold.

Moving to Asphalt 9, we ran four long-course races for the test and enabled 60FPS throughout the whole gameplay. Like with Genshin Impact, we managed to hit 60FPS consistently on Asphalt 9 at a slightly better 97% rate. The frame drops are only after finishing a race and starting a new one. Since Asphalt is less resource intensive than Genshin Impact, the realme GT3 ran cooler during our gameplay.

With both games hitting 60FPS consistently even at the highest possible settings, this shows that the realme GT3 can handle prolonged gaming very well even if it is not marketed as a gaming phone nor it has any active cooling solution built in. This makes the GT3 a rare, non-gaming phone that can consistently hit 60FPS on resource-heavy gaming titles without worrying about thermal throttling.

 

Charging: does the GT3 Heat Up Fast?

Outside of gaming, people will surely ask how are the realme GT3’s temps when you use its included 240w charging brick and custom 12A USB-C charging cable. After doing a few full-charge runs in a mix of environments (both air-conditioned and non-air-conditioned rooms), the GT3 did get warm but remained comfortable to hold despite the lightning-fast charging speeds.

Compared to other phones with fast charging speeds that we’ve tested in the past, the temps on both the GT3 and the 240w charging brick are less warm. This shows that we’ve come a long way with insanely fast charging solutions, with OPPO’s latest iteration of SuperVOOC being one of the most refined ones in the market.