A Direct3D renderer only appears under a Windows claim
A Direct3D renderer appears only under a Windows platform claim. A Windows claim without one is ordinary and is not asserted; N/A when the renderer is masked (severity: warn).
What a detector infers
Direct3D is a Windows API. ANGLE, the layer Chromium renders WebGL through, only names it in the unmasked renderer string when it is running on Direct3D, which means on Windows; on macOS the same string names Metal or OpenGL, and on Linux and Android OpenGL, Vulkan or SwiftShader.
So a renderer reading Direct3D11 beside a platform of Linux, macOS or Android is a renderer string that came from somewhere else — a table of Windows captures, or a real Windows machine whose platform was overridden. In the audit's corpus, 195 Windows captures from Blink browsers carry a Direct3D renderer and no genuine-looking non-Windows capture does; the single Android capture with a Direct3D 11 renderer is the shape this row exists for.
Measured directly, Chrome on Windows with a coherent Linux override applied through the DevTools protocol reports Direct3D11 under platform Linux. Only this direction is asserted. A Windows machine without Direct3D in its renderer is ordinary — ANGLE can also run on Vulkan or OpenGL, and virtual machines often render in software — and Chrome running under Wine claims Windows, so it agrees rather than tripping. A masked renderer reads N/A.
How to resolve it
Take the renderer and the platform from the same machine. The renderer string is assembled by the graphics backend, and the Direct3D backend only exists on Windows, so a Windows GPU string under a Linux or macOS identity is a pairing no ANGLE build produces. Present the platform the browser actually runs on.
Nearby checks in Render & GPU
- A fully transparent canvas pixel reads back as zero
canvas-alpha-zero-reads-blackA 2D canvas stores its pixels premultiplied: each colour channel is kept already multiplied by alpha. - Grey drawing reads back as grey
canvas-grey-stays-greyText, arcs and gradients drawn in a neutral grey on a transparent canvas read back with the three colour channels equal. - A Direct3D 11 renderer reports the caps ANGLE's D3D11 backend fixes
webgl-d3d11-fixed-capsWhen ANGLE runs WebGL on Direct3D 11 at feature level 11 — the renderer string reads Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0 — it does not ask the driver… - Every extension WebGL hands out is one it advertises
webgl-gettable-is-advertisedIn Chrome, getSupportedExtensions() and getExtension() read the same set: an extension the context can hand out is one it lists, and one it… - WebGL state reads back what the page just set
webgl-state-reads-backSome WebGL parameters are not capabilities but state the page itself controls. - readPixels writes only the pixels it was asked to read
webgl-readpixels-sentinelreadPixels writes into an array the page supplies, and the WebGL specification is precise about the edges: when the requested rectangle… - A worker OffscreenCanvas encodes the pixels it reads back
offscreen-canvas-exits-agreeA canvas has more than one way out. getImageData hands pixels straight to script; convertToBlob encodes the same pixels into a file, and… - WebGPU's preferred canvas format belongs to the claimed OS
webgpu-canvas-format-vs-osnavigator.gpu.getPreferredCanvasFormat() returns the texture format the platform's compositor wants to be handed, and Chrome on Windows and…
Clearcote is a browser built for fingerprint coherence
It is a Chromium fork, maintained by the same people who wrote this reference. It ships as a compiled browser rather than as a stealth script injected into someone else's — which is a description of how it is built, and is not an argument about how it behaves on this check.
This audit takes no position on how Clearcote scores on Render & GPU checks, on this one, or anywhere else. It has no baseline corpus of other people's fingerprints to rank you against and no vendor scoreboard — nearly every check is self-referential, asking one browser the same question through two independent APIs and reporting whether both answers can be true at once. It runs identically on any browser, including ours. Run it on yours and read the result yourself.
See the other checks in Render & GPU — the family d3d-renderer-only-on-windows belongs to.