If you look at what the Nvidia Shield box is delivering with regard pc ports its fairly low performance, often with reduced texture quality and lower quality assets and that's with a console that has 2x the CPU performance 1ghz vs 2ghz and over 3x the basic gpu power level of the Switch, something like 157 gflops vs 500 gflops so games have to be scaled back so they will run at 157 gflops in portable mode even if rendered natively higher when docked or maybe with docked anti-aliasing. Compared to games from both 360 and PS3 Shield games are both good and bad, it's clear the Tegra gpu has a higher more modern feature set so can do some graphic effects better but for sheer horsepower and grunt the older home consoles look better, number of polygons on screen, texturing etc. You would expect this as the Shield has lower memory bandwidth and also ps3/360 games were big games with top developers spending a lot of time optimising for a large market. This advantage can't be over-looked because a pc of the same spec as 360/ps3 probably wouldn't be able to run the games at all or with a horrible frame rate due to lack of optimisation and limited memory.
It does seem like despite there being performance limitations at least the Switch genuinely is easy to develop for so this type of conversion maybe an afternoon's work for the developer getting the game running. The nvidia gpu is pretty much standard and C x86 to ARM re-compiling is probably pretty easy, how much slower the ARM code is due to lack of CISC is very debatable but for code making heavy use of CISC it can be at most 3x faster for those routines and you have to make a comparison of x86 and ARM comparable CPU's as the baseline which is difficult in itself, Switch cpu is 4.6 MIPs per mhz and PC cpu's range from about 3 to 11 MIPs per mhz. Maybe overall CISC will give a 30-40% boost over RISC. Not forgetting that the CISC cpu's are probably all RISC underneath nowadays but use dedicated CISC to RISC silicon to interpret CISC commands rapidly in the chip. So I'm not expecting miracles for its performance level for both technical and commericial reasons. I suspect a big title like Skyrim will be more about technical reasons only but this one is likely a by the numbers cheap conversion to Switch.
They probably aren't too motivated to get the maximum out of the Switch hardware same as Shield and little optimisation will be done (welcome to the pc world) and they will probably make a profit on 10's of thousands of units sold or even 1,000's.
I think publishers need to look at their library of games from the past and look for games that are a good fit for Switch though, I personally don't think this one fits that well. Even if the original game didn't have it I think cel-shaded visuals work very well on a low performance platform and also look great on a portable screen. Darkness 2 had cel-shaded visuals and I loved that. Not only does it look great, need less technical performance but also means fluid 60fps is more likely to give games improved feel. I also think maybe strangely that looking at bright beautiful visuals in games is better for the mood than realistic graphics.
It would be great if Skyrim was cel-shaded on Switch. It gives it a unique feature and will run much better.
