The project was initially based on the 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver, which Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett and others claim had been obfuscated.

[3] It was suggested by the original author, Stéphane Marchesin, after his IRC client's French-language autocorrect system offered the word "nouveau" as a correction for the letters "nv".

The project uses several custom-made programs for its reverse engineering, such as MmioTrace (Memory Mapped I/O Trace),[10] REnouveau and Valgrind MMT.

It runs about six dozen different tests which the user of the computer then makes a tar.bz2 archive of and submits by e-mail, after which it is automatically transferred to the project's FTP servers for the developers to analyze.

Mesa 3D and the drivers it includes, supports multiple rendering interfaces, all designed to give user-space programs, such as e.g. video games or CAD software, access to the correspondent SIP blocks.

Another implementation is being written by free software enthusiasts, such as Brian Paul or Intel and coordinated in Mesa 3D.

[13] Mesa 3D supports multiple interfaces, all designed to give user-space programs, such as e.g. GStreamer or HandBrake, access to the correspondent SIP blocks.

It is also possible to use the IC designed for rendering calculations for this purpose, though this approach consumes much more electrical power compared to utilizing the PureVideo SIP block.

[17] nouveau was started in 2005 by Stéphane Marchesin as a series of patches upon the "nv" driver,[18] and officially announced in February 2006 at a FOSDEM event.

[22] nouveau originally used the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) of Mesa 3D for rendering 3D computer graphics, which allows to accelerate 3D drawing using the graphics processing unit (GPU) directly from the 3D application; but in February 2008 the work on DRI support ceased and moved on to the new Gallium3D.

As of 31 January 2014, Nvidia's Alexandre Courbot committed an extensive patch set which add initial support for the GK20A (Tegra K1) to nouveau.

[30][31] In 2024, lead engineer Ben Skeggs is hired by Nvidia, to continue working on the open source driver.

[39] In June 2014, Codethink reported to run Wayland-based Weston compositor with Linux kernel 3.15, making use of EGL and a "100% open-source graphics driver stack" on a Tegra K1.