The next two tables list the currently supported Windows operating systems and compilers.

x86_32 support is limited. See the x86 32-bit Support section for details.

This document is intended for readers familiar with Microsoft Windows operating systems and the Microsoft Visual Studio environment. You do not need previous experience with CUDA or experience with parallel computation.

You can verify that you have a CUDA-capable GPU through the Display Adapters section in the Windows Device Manager. Here you will find the vendor name and model of your graphics card(s). If you have an NVIDIA card that is listed in http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus, that GPU is CUDA-capable. The Release Notes for the CUDA Toolkit also contain a list of supported products.

The CUDA Toolkit installs the CUDA driver and tools needed to create, build and run a CUDA application as well as libraries, header files, CUDA samples source code, and other resources.

Before installing the toolkit, you should read the Release Notes, as they provide details on installation and software functionality.

<PackageName>.exe -s compiler_9.0 Display.Driver

On Windows 7 and later, the operating system provides two driver models under which the NVIDIA Driver may operate:

• The WDDM driver model is used for display devices.
• The Tesla Compute Cluster (TCC) mode of the NVIDIA Driver is available for non-display devices such as NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, and the GeForce GTX Titan GPUs; it uses the Windows WDM driver model.

The TCC driver mode provides a number of advantages for CUDA applications on GPUs that support this mode. For example:

• TCC eliminates the timeouts that can occur when running under WDDM due to the Windows Timeout Detection and Recovery mechanism for display devices.
• TCC allows the use of CUDA with Windows Remote Desktop, which is not possible for WDDM devices.
• TCC allows the use of CUDA from within processes running as Windows services, which is not possible for WDDM devices.
• TCC reduces the latency of CUDA kernel launches.

TCC is enabled by default on most recent NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. To check which driver mode is in use and/or to switch driver modes, use the nvidia-smi tool that is included with the NVIDIA Driver installation (see nvidia-smi -h for details).

Before continuing, it is important to verify that the CUDA toolkit can find and communicate correctly with the CUDA-capable hardware. To do this, you need to compile and run some of the included sample programs.

The bandwidthTest project is a good sample project to build and run. It is located in the NVIDIA Corporation\CUDA Samples\v9.0\1_Utilities\bandwidthTest directory.

If you elected to use the default installation location, the output is placed in CUDA Samples\v9.0\bin\win64\Release. Build the program using the appropriate solution file and run the executable. If all works correctly, the output should be similar to Figure 2.

The sample projects come in two configurations: debug and release (where release contains no debugging information) and different Visual Studio projects.

A few of the example projects require some additional setup. The simpleD3D9 example requires the system to have a Direct3D SDK (June 2010 or later) installed and the Visual C++ directory paths (located in Tools > Options...) properly configured. Consult the Direct3D documentation for additional details.

These sample projects also make use of the $CUDA_PATH environment variable to locate where the CUDA Toolkit and the associated .props files are.

The environment variable is set automatically using the Build Customization CUDA 9.0.props file, and is installed automatically as part of the CUDA Toolkit installation process.

You can reference this CUDA 9.0.props file when building your own CUDA applications.

When creating a new CUDA application, the Visual Studio project file must be configured to include CUDA build customizations. To accomplish this, click File-> New | Project... NVIDIA-> CUDA->, then select a template for your CUDA Toolkit version. For example, selecting the "CUDA 9.0 Runtime" template will configure your project for use with the CUDA 9.0 Toolkit. The new project is technically a C++ project (.vcxproj) that is preconfigured to use NVIDIA's Build Customizations. All standard capabilities of Visual Studio C++ projects will be available.

To specify a custom CUDA Toolkit location, under CUDA C/C++, select Common, and set the CUDA Toolkit Custom Dir field as desired. Note that the selected toolkit must match the version of the Build Customizations.

While Option 2 will allow your project to automatically use any new CUDA Toolkit version you may install in the future, selecting the toolkit version explicitly as in Option 1 is often better in practice, because if there are new CUDA configuration options added to the build customization rules accompanying the newer toolkit, you would not see those new options using Option 2.

Files which contain CUDA code must be marked as a CUDA C/C++ file. This can done when adding the file by right clicking the project you wish to add the file to, selecting Add\New Item, selecting NVIDIA CUDA 9.0\Code\CUDA C/C++ File, and then selecting the file you wish to add.

msbuild <projectname.extension> /t:Rebuild /p:CudaToolkitDir="drive:/path/to/new/toolkit/"