Setting up Visual Studio (Windows)

At the time of writing, only one version of Visual Studio appears to ingrate perfectly with both Python and the latest CUDA Toolkits—Visual Studio 2015; that is, Visual Studio version 14.0.

While it may be possible to make a sub-installation of this under a later version of Visual Studio (for example, 2017), we would suggest to the reader that you directly install Visual Studio 2015 with C/C++ support onto your system.

Visual Studio Community 2015, the free version of this software, can be downloaded at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/older-downloads/.

Here, we will do a minimalist installation, with only the necessary components for CUDA. We run the installation software, and select the Custom installation:

Click Next, then click the drop-down box for Programming Languages, and then choose Visual C++ (feel free to select other packages or programming languages if you want or need them for other purposes, but Visual C++ is all we will need for GPU programming):

This should take some time to install. After this is complete, we will be ready to install the CUDA Toolkit.