The NV3 architecture is Nvidia's third-generation graphics architecture, designed from 1996 to 1997 and released at the end of August 1997. It was designed by a team under the direction of David Kirk and was designed to be the "fastest triangle renderer on earth" at the time while being able to be designed in a very short time (due to Nvidia's near-bankruptcy during the period of its design), provide 2D acceleration and VGA compatibility, and at a reasonably low price. It did achieve this goal, although with many caveats: the graphics image quality was not as good as some rival cards (e.g. the Voodoo), there are a few minor missing features that were considered important at the time like trilinear texture filtering. Most importantly, it was by far the fastest 2D/3D combo card available at the time, since Voodoos before the Voodoo Banshee, excluding the disastrous Voodoo Rush, can only accelerate 3D applications, and only in fullscreen mode. Even when it was not used as a 3D card, it was often used as a Voodoo's passthrough (despite having almost equal 3D capabilities). The Riva had worse CPU scaling (performed slower on slower CPUs, despite its more complete triangle setup) than the Voodoo, was slightly faster, especially on smaller triangles, and had somewhat worse image quality (in 1997, having a usable image at all was considered decent due to catastrophe cards like the Alliance Semiconductor aT3D, but by 1999 it was considered almost bad image quality).