OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. 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 OpenGL ES library provides similar functionality for 3D graphics. OpenVG is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.
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. The first draft specification from the group was made available at the end of 2004, and the 1.0 version of the specification was released on August 1, 2005.
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.
Shortly after, Ivan Leben started another open-source project to implement an ANSI C implementation of the specification on top of OpenGL.
Since February 27, 2007 the OpenVG Sample Reference Implementation is available from the Khronos Website under MIT open source license.
On December 9, 2008, the Khronos Group publicly released the OpenVG 1.1 Specification. This latest revision includes glyph rendering for accelerated text, improved anti-aliasing, and Flash support. An updated reference implementation is also provided, as well as a conformance test suite.
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.
