The problem with Saturn and 3D visuals is, the Saturn did not have any proper hardware to accelerate 3D like a standard 3D accelerator, workstation, arcade board, PlayStation or Nintendo64.

Saturn lacked:
a geometry engine, a triangle setup engine, a 3D rendering engine. Its co-processors were designed to push 2D sprite-based graphics and backgrounds. The Saturn was not weak, it was very very powerful in that area. It had more brute power than the PlayStation, but not power targeted toward 3D graphics. PS1 had a reasonable amount of power which was targeted at 3D graphics; the Geometry Transform Engine and the GPU. So with less power, the PS1 was able to do more impressive looking 3D than Saturn. The only times Saturn out-did PS1 in 3D is when you would compare the very best assembly-coded Saturn game with the worst, poorly done PS1 game.

Saturn came out in late 1994 in Japan, and its hardware was actually finished later than the MODEL 2 arcade board which was completed in 1993. But compared to MODEL 2, Saturn was not the right kind of hardware for 3D games. Just because Sega spent alot of time trying to translated its MODEL2 hits onto Saturn, does not mean Saturn was good at this kind of thing, it wasn't. Sega could've saved themselves alot of trouble by going with either a Lockheed Martin Real3D based or at least a 3DO/Matsushita M2 based console. Either would've handled 3D games well. a LM Real3D one even better.