What is a GPU and why this library exists
A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a specialized processor that renders images, video, and 3D scenes. Modern GPUs power everything from desktop gaming and creative workstations to thin laptops and smartphones. On the web, browsers expose a subset of GPU identity through WebGL and WebGPU APIs — often as a renderer string such as "ANGLE (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060)".
CheckProxy.org maintains a community GPU models library built from anonymous WebGL scans submitted via our My GPU tool. Each entry records the renderer name, vendor, inferred device platform (PC, Laptop, Workstation, or Mobile), and when it was last seen. Use this page to research graphics hardware, compare renderer strings, or verify what your browser reports.
Unlike a retail spec sheet, this database reflects real-world browser fingerprints — useful for developers, QA teams, privacy researchers, and anyone running antidetect or multi-profile workflows who needs to know how a GPU appears online.
A brief history of GPUs
Dedicated graphics chips appeared in the 1980s (IBM Professional Graphics Adapter, early workstation cards). Consumer 3D acceleration took off in the mid-1990s with 3dfx Voodoo, NVIDIA RIVA, and ATI Rage — enabling real-time 3D in PC games.
The 2000s brought programmable shaders (DirectX 9 / OpenGL 2), unified architectures, and mobile GPUs (PowerVR, Adreno, Mali). Apple Silicon and AMD/NVIDIA RTX lines dominate the 2020s, while WebGL (2011) and WebGPU (2020s) let websites query GPU capabilities without installing drivers.
Today, renderer strings in browsers may differ from the physical card label because of driver layers (ANGLE on Windows), virtualization, or privacy hardening. Our library captures those strings as observed — making it a practical reference for web-facing GPU identity.
GPU terms & technical definitions
Key concepts you will see in the table above and in browser developer tools.
- GPU renderer (WebGL)
- The UNMASKED_RENDERER_WEBGL string returned by the browser — often includes brand, model, and driver layer (e.g. ANGLE, Metal). This is the primary key in our library.
- Vendor
- The graphics chip manufacturer reported alongside the renderer — typically NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, ARM, or Microsoft (for basic renderers).
- WebGL
- A JavaScript API for 2D/3D graphics inside the browser. WebGL 1.0/2.0 exposes limits such as max texture size and the renderer/vendor pair used for fingerprinting studies.
- WebGPU
- The successor to WebGL — lower overhead, modern GPU compute. Support varies by browser/OS; many entries in our library predate wide WebGPU adoption.
- VRAM (video memory)
- Dedicated memory on discrete GPUs (or shared system RAM on integrated/mobile chips). Browsers do not reliably expose VRAM size; infer capacity from model names or vendor documentation instead.
- Platform type
- Our classification of where the GPU is typically used: PC (desktop), Laptop (portable / integrated / Max-Q), Workstation (Quadro, Radeon Pro, datacenter cards), or Mobile (phone/tablet SoC GPUs).
Frequently asked questions about GPUs
Common questions about GPU renderer strings, browser detection, and the CheckProxy.org graphics library.
GPU vendor popularity ranking
Vendors sorted by the number of distinct GPU renderer strings recorded in our library. Click a vendor to browse all models from that manufacturer.
| # | Vendor | GPU models | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | NVIDIA | 504 | View models |
| 2 | Intel | 470 | View models |
| 3 | AMD | 320 | View models |
| 4 | Qualcomm | 133 | View models |
| 5 | ARM Mali | 101 | View models |
| 6 | Apple | 50 | View models |
| 7 | PowerVR | 21 | View models |