Some debates in the gaming world never really die, and one that is still alive is the one about Sega Saturn. Was it a weak console that was really built for 2D, or a beast that was unfortunately nearly impossible to make games for, which made competitors' titles look better?
In an interview with Famitsu almost three years ago, Sega boss Yukio Sugino said that the company was looking into the possibility of releasing a Sega Saturn Mini, but that this was complicated by the fact that "Sega Saturn has surprisingly high performance." As recently as a year ago, Argonaut founder Jez San (best known as the programmer of Star Fox, among other titles) weighed in on the debate, saying that "it was exceptionally more powerful than the PlayStation at the time", with the caveat that it was unreasonably difficult to develop for.
The discussions are likely to continue, but now one of the world's leading Saturn programmers has posted something that could be used as ammunition in the debate. YouTube user XL2 has been posting amazing videos for years showing what the Saturn is capable of in the right hands... including a shockingly good-looking version of Unreal 1998 that would have beaten pretty much everything else if it had been released at the time.
After a period of absence, he has made a comeback on the channel with a new video and this time he shows that the Sega Saturn was actually capable of ray-tracing. This is a technology that has only begun to be used seriously in this generation and enables more realistic lighting by "tracking" how light rays would bounce in reality on surfaces, in mirrors, through glass and using this to create more authentic shadows, reflections, and lighting effects.
<social>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8rQ47YRbFs</social>
Whether it could be used effectively in games for the console is debatable, and the creator himself says that he "need to find a way to integrate it a reasonable speed on the Saturn", but there is no doubt that there was a lot more power in Sega's 1994 dud than one might have thought.