Although my work is not closely related to high performance computing, I just had this inherent obsession of optimizing programs to make them run faster (which I consider to be another expression of speed obsession). Last night I finally couldn’t stand waiting endlessly for NVIDIA to deliver the VS 2008-compatible CUDA toolkit and wanted to see for myself the cool examples CUDA SDK provides. Another key factor is that I still have my XP partition, which is something I can afford to screw up.
I then installed VS 2005 on it, but before I can run the examples I also need to install CUDA-enabled driver ( I tried without the driver, it didn’t work). Anyway, the driver version is 177.35 as the time of writing and when I ran setup.exe it prompted that my hardware is not supported in this driver. Hey, what’s up with that? I thought all 8-series graphic cards are CUDA-enabled (mine is 8800 GT by the way), this statement does not stand if I cannot install the CUDA-enabled driver which is required to run CUDA programs.
Googled a little bit, I soon learned that 177.35 was designed for the newest GTX 200 series (280 and 260) and I also found a workaround. Basically by replacing the original nv4_disp.inf (nv_disp.inf in Vista) with a modified one, I tell the installer that my graphic card should also be entitled to use this driver.
After a restart all the examples in the SDK are running properly. Then I plan to move a little further – install the toolkit and SDK on my MacBook Pro (with a 8600M GT). The process was painless except I need to add CUDA to my $PATH. Also worth noting is that only CUDA 1.1 is compatible with OS X (CUDA 2.0 beta2 for most of other platforms), hence there are less examples in the SDK.
One more thing, I still need a CMake module in order to generate my CUDA project files. Luckily some guru has already worked on it (even better, there is also FindCg.cmake). But since I have not tested it yet, I cannot guarantee it will function properly.
Sweet! You totally pointed me in the right direction, and now I have the Forceware drivers installed on my MacBook Pro, 8600M GT, in Windows XP 32-bit.
One thing is– I had to use this driver:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19110
Only difficulty is that a couple of things didn’t copy during installation, but it works fine for me so they must have been relatively unimportant. The driver shows up as updated in the nvidia control panel.
You were not able to use the official driver and the modified INF (inside the workaround link)? I would make sure the driver is installed properly because when things go wrong you have a better chance to rule out the driver issue first.