Cuda toolkit — Cuda driver

CisMine Ng
3 min readFeb 13, 2024

Before using Nvidia’s profiling tools, it’s essential to have a basic understanding of how CUDA works. In this article, I’ll briefly explain two commonly mentioned concepts in CUDA: CUDA Toolkit and CUDA Driver.

I will provide a simple explanation without diving too deep into the details, so don’t worry.

Before explaining these two terms, let’s start with an analogy to help you understand better: Imagine you’re playing a video game, and your character is at level 10, equipped with a level 5 weapon. In this scenario, your total combat power is 100. You have two ways to increase your character’s combat power:

  • The Easy Way: Find a level 10 weapon that matches your character’s level.
  • The Hard Way: Increase your character’s level.

A small note: You cannot equip a weapon with a higher level than your character’s level.

In the context of CUDA, it’s similar. If you want to optimize a CUDA program (excluding code-related factors), you have two options: increase the level of the CUDA Toolkit or increase the level of the CUDA Driver.

  • CUDA Driver: This represents the capability of your computer (similar to your character’s level). The more powerful your computer is, the faster it can run, and each computer will have a certain level of capability.

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CisMine Ng
CisMine Ng

Written by CisMine Ng

My name is CisMine Ng. I am currently pursuing a B.Sc. degree. I am interested in the following topics: DL in Computer Vision, Parallel Programming With Cuda.

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