It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfaces by offloading computationally intensive graphics processing from the CPU onto a GPU to save energy.

The OpenVG group was formed on July 6, 2004 by a selection of major firms including 3Dlabs, Bitboys, Ericsson, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Motorola, Nokia, PalmSource, Symbian, and Sun Microsystems.

Other firms including chip manufacturers ATI, LG Electronics, Mitsubishi Electric, NVIDIA, and Texas Instruments and software- and/or IP vendors DMP, Esmertec, ETRI, Falanx Microsystems, Futuremark, HI Corporation, Ikivo, HUONE (formerly MTIS), Superscape, and Wow4M have also participated in the working group.

On January 16, 2007, Zack Rusin from Tungsten Graphics announced the start of an independent open-source implementation of OpenVG built on top of QtOpenGL.

On May 1, 2009 Rusin added OpenVG state tracker to Mesa, which enables SVG vector graphics to be hardware accelerated by any Gallium3D-based driver.