WebGL fingerprint

Also called: WebGL fingerprinting, GPU fingerprint.

WebGL exposes the graphics stack to a page in two ways. The blunt one is a pair of strings: through the debug renderer info extension a page can read the unmasked vendor and the unmasked renderer, which on an ordinary machine name the GPU and often the driver. The subtle one is the same trick canvas uses, applied to a 3D scene — render it, read the buffer back, hash it — plus the long list of supported extensions, maximum texture sizes and precision limits, each of which varies by hardware.

The reason this matters more than most signals is that it is hardware-derived and therefore hard to change honestly: a machine cannot simply decide it has a different GPU. That is also why an incoherent answer is so visible — a renderer string naming an Apple GPU beside a platform string saying Windows describes nothing that ships. Argus spoofs WebGL in the renderer, including the reported vendor and renderer, as part of the same coordinated identity that sets the platform, screen and timezone, so the graphics answer agrees with everything around it. The fingerprints page explains why coherence beats concealment.