What operating system does CUDA run best on?

I e-mailed NVIDIA and they told me to post my question regarding CUDA here in hopes of a developer coming across the question. However, if anyone else knows the answer feel free to jump in.

I’m the type of person that loves to try out new things, such as GPU2 folding on CUDA-based NVIDIA graphics cards. Unfortunately, I’ve had nothing but issues with crashing drivers when using drivers any earlier than 177_92 (which are currently beta).

What is surprising is, the beta drivers actually work better than the released drivers for my card (an eVGA 8800GTX not overclocked).

My questions is, I know CUDA uses the GPU to process, but what operating system does CUDA coexist with the best on Vista? Or in other words, which operating system do you think the graphics card (with CUDA, specifically an 8800GTX) would work best with, 32 bit Vista or 64 bit Vista?

Best operating system for CUDA? Anything except for Vista >.<

More seriously, though, 177.92 may well be the first driver that even runs CUDA on Vista. For some reason, Vista and CUDA hate each other, to the point that it took NVIDIA an entire year after the first release of CUDA to get the thing to run on Vista at all. They managed to port it to OSX first, for heaven’s sake!

Most likely your official drivers are one of the last of the pre-CUDA ones, which would explain nicely why they weren’t working ;-)

In any case, the situation has improved drastically over the last month or two. Still, between the Vistas, I’d say that 32-bit probably works better, if only because the larger userbase gives it priority when Nvidia doles out development time.