Review: Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro Lets You Play Games From Front to Back

I booted up the game Mortal Kombat Mobile on the new Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro, and the tutorial that led me into Scorpion pulling off a Fatality against Sub-Zero shows the fiery character slicing through his opponent’s skull like butter. The savage slice was made all the more graphic by one of the phone’s headlining features: a 185Hz display, which turned the act into a truly gory, shocking and visceral moment. The 9 Pro supports refresh rates that are higher than those on most big-screen televisions, and it actually made Mortal Kombat seem intimidating on a phone.

But here’s what makes the ROG Phone 9 Pro even more uniquely aimed at gamers: There’s a mini-LED display on the back of the phone that supports four retro-style games, including a take on Snake (like the one found on old Nokia phones). The rear retro games are controlled by pressing and tapping on the touch sensitive sides of the phone, called AirTriggers, like using the shoulder buttons on a gamepad.

Yes, you read that correctly: You can play games on the front and the back of this phone. 

At a time when phone makers are using generative AI and wild folding screen designs to tempt people to upgrade, Asus is like a kid off in the corner of a sandbox making a sandcastle on its own terms. The ROG Phone 9 Pro is undoubtedly aimed at gamers, but it’s also a glimpse into the future. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, which you can expect to see in premium phones from Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi and others in 2025.

These features and powerful specs don’t come cheap, though: the ROG Phone 9 Pro starts at $1,200 for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and the model that I tested includes 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $1,500. Asus also sells a step-down, non-Pro model for $1,000 that includes the same Snapdragon 8 Elite processor but omits the mini-LED display. But whichever model you prefer, it’s likely that you’ll want to make sure mobile gaming is still your primary use case for this phone. Even though this device is more than capable of handling many media needs and includes a nice camera, there are some notable trade-offs that are being made to emphasize gaming performance instead.

Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro gaming

The Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro’s gaming features remain the centerpiece of this device, with specific characteristics that are accessible by using the Game Genie overlay. This is a submenu that can be turned on by dragging diagonally from the corner of the screen while in a game, giving access to a variety of ways to tweak your phone to enhance gameplay. The ability to set the phone’s display to a 185Hz refresh rate is the biggest new addition in terms of gaming features, and you can set the phone to that high refresh rate only when playing games. The Phone 9 Pro otherwise maxes out at a 165Hz refresh rate, which is still plenty fast.

However, this 185Hz addition, coupled with the phone’s new processor, allowed me to play games with console-level graphics quite easily on the Phone 9 Pro. Aside from the prior Mortal Kombat example, I fired up Dead Cells — a 2D game that also supports the higher refresh rate – and turned on the game’s higher-resolution textures and switched the frame rate cap off. With this game running consistently higher than 160 frames per second, the various dungeon monsters animated smoothly as they each prepared to attack my character. I play Dead Cells often across mobile and console platforms, and the experience felt much closer to the way the game scales up when running it on a 4K television over the Xbox Game Pass service rather than a phone.  

I set Fortnite, a 3D game, to run at 90 FPS — its maximum cap — along with its highest graphical settings. The phone had no trouble staying at those higher settings over the course of multiple Battle Royale matches and a 12-minute Fortnite Festival rhythm game playlist.

The phone did heat up during these sessions, but never to the point where it became uncomfortable to hold. The Game Genie’s overlay claimed that, at its hottest during my Fortnite matchups, the phone heated up to 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 degrees Fahrenheit). 

My ROG Phone 9 Pro review unit came bundled with this year’s AeroActive Cooler attachment, which plugs into the phone’s side USB-C port like an attachable spider with cooling fans inside. During my Fortnite gaming session, it brought the temperature down from 42 to 39 degrees Celsius. In the following match where I had the cooler on the entire time, the overlay reported the temperature staying between 38 and 40 degrees Celsius. 

The cooler is certainly nice to have, especially for someone who envisions themselves playing games at high settings for longer periods of time. But the phone’s internal cooling system combined with a case will likely be enough to keep the device comfortable for longer gaming sessions.

The ROG Phone 9 Pro also supports passthrough charging like previous models, allowing the phone power itself directly from a power adapter without needing to use the battery, which is good for preserving battery health. Like with the prior Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro, the Phone 9 Pro supports 65-watt wired charging of the battery and 15-watt wireless charging.

Asus is adding more AI features into its gaming mode as well, but the current implementation is limited. Most games can take advantage of the AI Grabber, also available on the Phone 8, which is Asus’ own version of Google’s Circle to Search. Instead of drawing a circle, you move a scannable shape over text you would like the AI Grabber to scan, and then it can offer to do a quick web search. The Phone 9 version of the AI Grabber adds a language translation tool into it, which is nice but not exactly much different than switching to a web browser app. I also wish the AI Grabber would recognize images like Google’s Circle to Search does, but for now it’s relegated to just text.

Asus also offers AI-powered shortcuts for a smaller section of games, such as Genshin Impact. This can include programming concurrent actions like having AI tap items to pick them up while you focus on more manual actions like combat. Asus also said that this feature can help automatically move through dialog options or simplify how your character can escape from an enemy’s trapping spell, generally by doing the required screen taps for you. Since these were limited to specific titles, I wasn’t able to test these. But I like the concept of these AI-assisted controls and could see myself using them to program repetitive actions in other games. Outside of these gaming enhancements, Asus also includes AI features for noise cancellation in phone calls, call translation for multilingual conversations and transcribing voice memos.

Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro design and cameras

The star of the ROG Phone 9 Pro’s design is its enhanced LED display, which features 641 mini-LED dots and the aforementioned mini games you can play on the back of the phone. This is nearly double the number of dots on the 8 Pro, which was 341, and as such the games will not be coming to that earlier phone. These four games are available in the AniMe Play section of the phone: Speedy Runner (an endless run game), Snake Venture (identical to the Snake game made popular on Nokia flip phones), the spaceship-blasting Aero Invaders and Brick Smasher. All of them have a very Atari-like appearance and bring a cute addition of functionality to the LEDs.

When these LEDs aren’t used for games, they can be programmed to show contextual information like the time and some notification information. It provides a decorative touch that enhances the character of the phone.

Otherwise, the 9 Pro’s specs and appearance are largely identical to the ROG Phone 8 Pro from earlier this year. Both phones have similar cameras, AI features and include two USB-C ports (one on the bottom and one on the side for playing games in landscape while charging). Aside from the insane 185Hz refresh rate, the display itself is also the same, featuring a 6.78-inch AMOLED at a 2,400×1,080-pixel resolution.

The similarity to the previous ROG model isn’t a bad thing. And for the gaming audience that these ROG phones target, it could be exactly what someone is looking for if upgrading from the ROG Phone 6 or 7 editions.

If you’re coming from one of Asus’ earlier gaming phones, you’ll gain the darker matte design with IP68 certification that debuted with the ROG 8. But it’s the 9 Pro’s insane 185Hz screen when in game mode that makes this ROG a step ahead of previous models.

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The cameras do a decent job, but I wouldn’t consider them a primary reason for purchasing this phone. They include a 50-megapixel wide, a 13-megapixel ultrawide and a 32-megapixel telephoto lens. The phone also includes a 32-megapixel selfie shooter.

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I took a variety of photos in the CNET office, and in a more extreme case took photos while at a dark karaoke bar. All of the photos included a reasonable amount of detail, whether they were taken in a well-lit office or a studio with dim lighting.  

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Typically, I find that cameras on phones in this price range will do a little more work to bring out details in low-light settings, but the Phone 9 Pro will likely do just enough work in these challenging places to get by. For instance, in my karaoke room photos taken on the wide lens and the selfie camera, there is a lot of visible noise, but you can easily still make out details in the room.

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Like with the ROG Phone 8 and the more consumer-focused Zenfone 11 Ultra, the Phone 9 Pro also includes Asus’ video stabilization. This feature crops slightly into the frame and uses gyroscopes to help reduce the amount of motion within a video. It provides a more “gimbal”-like look, minimizing shakiness in the resulting video. This can be turned off in the settings in case you prefer a more wobbly look. 

There are a few areas that I wish Asus would improve to stay competitive with phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 series. Chief among them is the software and security support; Asus currently offers two years of software updates and five years of security updates. Even though the more gamer-focused audience might want to upgrade their hardware after two or three years, this pledge feels quite short compared with the seven-year support period of Google’s Pixel series and the Galaxy S24. I’d also like to see a faster hypersonic fingerprint reader, since currently the ROG uses a slower optical one. While that optical reader does work fine, this is an expensive phone at over $1,000, so it’s worth acknowledging that Asus is making some trade-offs.

Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro performance and battery

The ROG Phone 9 Pro’s power is nothing to scoff at. The benchmark tests I ran on the CPU and the graphics show a giant leap in Geekbench 6 and 3DMark scores, with the ROG Phone 9 Pro leaving nearly every 2024 flagship phone in the dust.

Geekbench 6.0 benchmark

Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro 3,075 9,710Samsung Galaxy S24 2,255 6,875Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro 2,252 6,946

3DMark Wild life extreme benchmark

Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro 5,923 35.47fpsSamsung Galaxy S24 4,752 28.46fpsAsus ROG Phone 8 Pro 5,195 31.09fps

The Phone 9 Pro also includes a big 5,800-mAh battery, expanding on the 5,500-mAh battery seen on the Phone 8 Pro and the Zenfone 11 Ultra. And that battery size combined with the phone’s power efficiency made it easy to get through a full day without concern. However, spending lots of game time with the ROG Phone 9 Pro with more intensive settings turned on will certainly make a dent in the battery. My 45-minute battery endurance test, which featured equal parts playing Dead Cells at high settings, a video call and YouTube streaming, depleted the battery from 100% to 89%. This is a slightly higher consumption than what I found when testing the Phone 8 Pro, but is likely attributable to the new phone’s additional processing power. 

Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro: Bottom line

The Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro shows off the kind of power and performance I hope to see in new 2025 phones, especially should they include the same Snapdragon 8 Elite processor or a comparable rival chip. I certainly appreciate how well the phone handles intensive graphics and its utterly high 185Hz refresh rate in games that can support it. And even though the phone offers only a small iteration on the Phone 8 Pro’s design, it’s good to see the LED display on the back gain more personality. 

But it’s also hard to recommend this phone to anyone outside of gaming circles, especially when you consider all the other services that more mainstream Android phone makers are providing for less money. Google and Samsung are both investing heavily into AI features that span multiple areas of the phone including photography, transcription and translation. While the Asus does support some of these features, such as Google’s Gemini AI, the company’s own contributions appear limited to a few game features and call enhancements like AI noise canceling. It’s especially notable that Asus is providing only two years of software updates, meaning that the phone won’t receive new features even though it will continue to get security updates. 

The Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro could be great for prior ROG owners along with the gaming phone-curious as the device is certainly capable of meeting most needs. But if you want to buy a phone that costs over $1,000 as a longer-term investment and mobile gaming is less of a core feature for you, it’s quite likely that a device from Samsung, Google or OnePlus is the way to go.

How we test phones

Every phone tested by CNET’s reviews team was actually used in the real world. We test a phone’s features, play games and take photos. We examine the display to see if it’s bright, sharp and vibrant. We analyze the design and build to see how it is to hold and whether it has an IP-rating for water resistance. We push the processor’s performance to the extremes using standardized benchmark tools like GeekBench and 3DMark, along with our own anecdotal observations navigating the interface, recording high-resolution videos and playing graphically intense games at high refresh rates.

All the cameras are tested in a variety of conditions from bright sunlight to dark indoor scenes. We try out special features like night mode and portrait mode and compare our findings against similarly priced competing phones. We also check out the battery life by using it daily as well as running a series of battery drain tests.

We take into account additional features like support for 5G, satellite connectivity, fingerprint and face sensors, stylus support, fast charging speeds and foldable displays, among others that can be useful. We balance all of this against the price to give you the verdict on whether that phone, whatever price it is, actually represents good value. While these tests may not always be reflected in CNET’s initial review, we conduct follow-up and long-term testing in most circumstances.