Cuda Installation on Windows 11 laptop

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Setup and Installation
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Hi, I apologize in advance for such basic questions. Just got a new Windows 11 laptop with an RTX 4070 mobile GPU and I’d like to explore GPU programming in Python and via C. Trouble is it isn’t clear how to proceed; I really don’t want to mess up the installation. I can run NVIDIA-SMI from a Windows Power Shell and the output shows: Driver Version: 528.66 and Cuda Version: 12.0. Does this mean Nvidia drivers and Cuda are already installed? I’m guessing no because if I type nvcc --version the result is nvcc : The term ‘nvcc’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

In my searches I’ve found some additional confusing things:

  1. I’ve read that the Cuda toolkit can be installed by installing Pytorch within Anaconda, but I have no idea if this will allow me to use the GPU with C (for example in Codeblocks or some other IDE).

  2. Looking at the CUDA Installation Guide for Microsoft Windows, the second item under System Requirements is “A supported version of Linux with a gcc compiler and toolchain”. This seems strange because I’m using Windows, not Linux.

  3. If I go to the Pytorch site, the installation instructions are for Cuda 11.7 or 11.8, but not 12.0 (which is shown from the Nvidia-smi command)

Can someone suggest what I do from here?

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If you haven’t explicitly installed the Cuda Toolkit or HPC Tools, you only have the Nvidia driver installed and nvidia-smi is installed along with it. The Cuda version you see in the nvidia-smi output is the version used to compile the driver.

As you want to use pytorch, you probably want 11.8, but you can have more than one version resident.

This appears to be a typo in the 12.2 version - the 11.8 instructions say:

To use CUDA on your system, you will need the following installed:

    A CUDA-capable GPU
    A supported version of Microsoft Windows
    A supported version of Microsoft Visual Studio
    The NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit (available at http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads)

Edit: 11.8 is the minimum version you want as that version introduced support for SM8.9 GPU’s, which you have.

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Drat, I just realized my title said windows and I have a Linux question, so I’ll make a new post.