The Saturn went through many, many changes during its development. Even before it was called Saturn, when Sega was working on a 32-bit console in 1991, it was known as the Giga Drive, and based on their 2D-only System32 arcade board (that powered games like Golden Axe Revenge of Death Adder).
The design changed from a 2D-only to a 2D/3D console that had bolted-on, poorly concieved 3D capabilities.

Sega should've held off on releasing the version of Saturn that it did, until 1996, with this technology, the Lockheed Martin Real3D/100 chipset.





750,000 z-buffered, texture-mapped, g-shaded, lit, mip-mapped, texture-filtered, anti-aliased, alpha blended polygons/sec

It would not have been as powerful as their MODEL 3 board which used TWO Real3D/Pro-1000 GPUs, providing 1.5M polys/sec but, a Saturn with Real3D/100 (which was made of 3 processors itself: geometry processor, graphics processor, texture processor) would've been more powerful than the Sega/Martin Marietta MODEL 2 board, PlayStation, Nintendo64,
3Dfx Voodoo Graphics PC card, and 3DO's/Matsushita's unreleased M2.

A PowerPC CPU + Real3D/100 GPU based Saturn would've been able to handle upgraded ports of MODEL 2 games, and scaled-down versions of MODEL 3 games, lasted until 2001 when a new generation could've arrived with more capabilities than Dreamcast, and something more like the Xbox. Thus, there would have been no need to release Dreamcast in 1998,1999.

Instead, we had to suffer for years with the Saturn as it was, with its inability to handle proper 3D visuals. When the Dreamcast arrived in 1998/1999, it offered a huge leap in 3D visuals but wasn't compatible with MODEL 2 or MODEL 3 graphics. By then, Sega was dead as a hardware company.