Deobfuscate GPU vendor name on iOS 12.2+ and Safari 14+

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

See: https://medium.com/@Samsy/detecting-apple-a10-iphone-7-to-a11-iphone-8-and-b019b8f0eb87 and https://51degrees.com/blog/51degrees-open-sources-gpu-renderer-technique-to-identify-apple-devices-using-ios-122-or-higher

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

From what I can quickly see on my iPhone 8 (13.1.3) it reports the GPU name just fine.

[pqml]

Hi,

I tested on several iOS devices (iPhone 7+ with iOS 12 , iPhone 7 with iOS 13, iPhone X with iOS 13.2)

detect-gpu wrongly reports their GPU as apple a12x bionic gpu (This is the iPad Pro GPU chip)

On https://webglreport.com/ they are all referred as Apple GPU

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Thanks @pqml for your report! I'll have a look if I'm able to add a workaround without drastically increasing the library size. I've updated the user agent library to handle the new ipadOS user agent which should help with classifying it.

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Active Theory does a CPU benchmark to pick a GPU. This could work reasonably well but I would need to inform if they would be okay with me modifying it and open sourcing it.

Perhaps I can use a similar principle, use https://github.com/Strernd/cpu-benchmark/blob/master/index.js (or another CPU benchmark) and write my own tests.

That said I would like to avoid using these hacks as it causes the library to require more maintenance (with new product releases and devices getting older) than I have time for.

[luruke]

Interesting @TimvanScherpenzeel – I'm wondering how that would work when the phone is doing other stuff in background (updates, notifications...)

[Samsy]

Hum, hard to rely on those tests

https://medium.com/@Samsy/detecting-apple-a10-iphone-7-to-a11-iphone-8-and-b019b8f0eb87

That would be a 100% way to differentiate them, ridiculous way... but still

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Hum, hard to rely on those tests

https://medium.com/@Samsy/detecting-apple-a10-iphone-7-to-a11-iphone-8-and-b019b8f0eb87

That would be a 100% way to differentiate them, ridiculous way... but still

Thanks for your research on it 💯

I'll have a look if I can codegolf your findings down using vanilla WebGL and if it is able to detect all the different GPU's reliably.

Tracking branch here: https://github.com/TimvanScherpenzeel/detect-gpu/tree/add-apple-gpu-samsy

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Had some time this evening to look into it and was able to port @Samsy 's Three.js implementation to vanilla WebGL. You can have a look at it here: https://github.com/TimvanScherpenzeel/detect-gpu/blob/add-apple-gpu-samsy/src/internal/deobfuscateRendererString.ts. Would like to add / test all the affected models in question but I don't have many of them.

[Samsy]

Will test it tomorrow !
Would love to see credits in there too if that's possible ;)

Many thanks !

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Will test it tomorrow !
Would love to see credits in there too if that's possible ;)

Many thanks !

Thanks, I’ve added your article and link to the source 🙂

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

In terms of testing I was able to test various devices on Browserstack except for the latest iPhone 11. I'm thinking about combining the resolution test with these findings to be able to narrow them down further.

[Ben-Mack]

Hi @TimvanScherpenzeel, Is the check ready? Could you merge it into master?

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Hi @Ben-Mack, the check partly there but not yet fully ready. I had stopped working on it as I didn't have the means to properly test the solution nor did I have a need in my job to work on it. You are welcome to contribute checks that could narrow down the GPU version more accurately. As it currently stands I feel the amount of code and the obscure complexity of it doesn't bring enough benefits to add it to master.

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

@Samsy @Ben-Mack Safari 14+ also appears to obfuscate its renderer as 'apple gpu'. Seeing as Safari is only ran on Apple products we could possibly narrow it down quite a bit. The current implementation returns 'fallback' as mentioned in #25.

I've opened an MR to track progress: #26

If any of you would like to help or have ideas how this could be solved it would be greatly appreciated.

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Will be included in the 2.0 release

[TimvanScherpenzeel]

Included in release 2.0.0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/detect-gpu/v/2.0.0

Thanks for all the input!

By combining this implementation with other meta data (screen size, user agent) the results from my testing are shown to be accurate.