Nintendo doesn’t care about performance. They never have. They only care about the games being as the late Iwata said “Above all, video games are meant to just be one thing: Fun for everyone”. Also, Iwata said this about Nintendo “We consider ourselves, above all else, as a gaming company. We believe other companies (in the console marketplace) see themselves primarily as technology companies”. With that in mind, it’s no surprise the Nintendo Switch is rumored to have 1 TFLOPs.
Nintendo Switch has 1 TFLOPs
Flops are a marketing thing. Flops do not directly correlate to graphical potential. Flops are like a synthetic benchmark and the numbers can be inflated by many variables such as GPU architecture, computer cores, core frequency, and the size of the transistors that make up the GPU. There are GPUs, with fewer flops, that have had better performance in games than GPUs with higher Flops.
A lot of Wii games look pretty bad. But most WiiU games look absolutely beautiful while also running very well at 60fps. Smash 4 being a great example. We’ve hit diminishing returns hard. They could drive up the cost by a few hundred dollars by making the Nintendo Switch more powerful and everyone would complain because of it. Or they could have about the same performance and same graphics for much less.
Console gamers have been obsessed with flops ever since the PS4 was announced. Console gamers in 2013 vs 2015 talking about flops is incomparable. It was actually spoken about far more in 2013. Such talks among console gamers have been dying down over time. Also, PC gamers have been talking about flops for a very long time.