"Fingerprinting" comes up in two very different contexts — websites tracking you, and games identifying your PC. They are related ideas but not the same thing.
What browser fingerprinting is
When you visit a website, your browser reveals a surprising amount: screen resolution, time zone, installed fonts, language, the exact way your GPU renders a hidden test image (canvas and WebGL fingerprinting), audio-processing quirks and dozens of other small details. Combined, these form a fingerprint distinctive enough to recognise you across visits — even without cookies.
What hardware fingerprinting is
Hardware fingerprinting, the kind anti-cheats use, works at a lower level. Instead of browser-visible traits, it reads identifiers from the operating system and the machine itself: disk serials, MAC addresses, the Windows machine GUID, motherboard firmware data. It needs software running on your PC to do this — which is why anti-cheats install a component, while a website cannot read those values.
The key difference
Browser fingerprinting is statistical: no single trait identifies you, but the combination is rare. It also drifts — update your browser or change your screen and the fingerprint shifts. Hardware fingerprinting is more deterministic: a volume serial or SMBIOS UUID is a specific value, stable until the underlying component changes.
Why both matter
If your concern is web privacy, the browser layer is what matters: anti-fingerprinting browsers and extensions target exactly those traits. If your concern is game bans, the hardware layer is what matters, and browser settings are irrelevant to it. Confusing the two leads people to apply web-privacy fixes to a hardware-level problem.
The takeaway
Same word, two layers. Browser fingerprinting is about what your browser tells websites; hardware fingerprinting is about what your machine tells software running on it. Knowing which one you are dealing with decides which tools are even relevant.