What a real machine reports about its GPU

A page can ask the browser for the name of the graphics card.

The second answer is the browser's own survey of what the card can do. That table is not handed to pages.

1. 1

   Asks for the name

   The vendor and the renderer the browser reports for the card.

2. 2

   The state the browser keeps

   One row for each capability, and the row holds a state rather than a name.

3. 3

   What a site can put together

   A named card with no WebGPU behind it is worth a second look.

We put both questions to a rented Windows server running our own build. It has no graphics card of its own, which is exactly what makes its answer worth reading.

Every row of the capability table came back switched off. Some of them fall back to software rendering, the rest are off with nothing behind them at all.

WebGPU is a second road to the same hardware, and on that machine it was not narrow but absent. There was no entry point to ask in the first place.

We tried three ways of starting the browser, each of them twice: hidden and with a real window on screen. All 6 attempts answered the same way.

• Started as it ships

  No entry point at all.

• Asked for a software adapter

  No entry point, and the request had nothing to attach itself to.

• Asked for software rendering throughout

  No entry point, on the hidden run and on the visible one alike.

A launch flag chooses which adapter serves WebGPU. It cannot help once the browser has already marked the whole capability off in its survey of the machine.

That mark goes down before any adapter is chosen. No combination of flags moved it, and the reason sits a layer underneath the thing they control.

The card name a profile reports is drawn from its seed as a pair. The vendor and the renderer move together, and every platform has its own pool of pairs.

Pick another renderer from the list and the processor architecture the profile reports is redrawn along with it. A card from one family beside a processor from another describes a machine nobody sells.

1. 1

   The pair moves together

   A vendor without its matching renderer is a mismatch any check can see.

2. 2

   The platform picks the pool

   A Windows renderer line looks nothing like the one a Linux machine produces.

3. 3

   The processor follows the card

   Choosing another renderer redraws the architecture the profile reports.

The acceptance run on that machine could not take a WebGPU snapshot, because there was nothing to take one from. It counts that line as failed rather than skipped, and the build was not accepted.

So what we say about WebGPU on Windows stops where the measurement stopped. A road nobody has driven is not a road we call open.