  In this article the concept of saturation of an arbitrary regularization
method is formalized based upon the original idea of saturation for spectral
regularization methods introduced by A. Neubauer in 1994. Necessary and
sufficient conditions for a regularization method to have global saturation are
provided. It is shown that for a method to have global saturation the total
error must be optimal in two senses, namely as optimal order of convergence
over a certain set which at the same time, must be optimal (in a very precise
sense) with respect to the error. Finally, two converse results are proved and
the theory is applied to find sufficient conditions which ensure the existence
of global saturation for spectral methods with classical qualification of
finite positive order and for methods with maximal qualification. Finally,
several examples of regularization methods possessing global saturation are
shown.
