CIS 5650 - Setup instructions for your Windows PC

Setup your Windows 11 Computer

Follow this guide to setup your personal Windows computer.

This guide assumes that you have admin access to your computer.

1. Download and install the latest NVIDIA GPU Driver for your GPU.
2. Download and install Git.
   • Shehzan’s preferred installation options (other than defaults):
     • Adjusting your Path environment: Select Use Git and optional tools from Command Prompt. This option allows you to use Git from both Git Bash and Command Prompt.
     • Configuring the line ending conversion: Select Checkout as-is, commit as-is. Shehzan uses this option because he also changes all his preferred editors to use Unix line endings. If you do not want to change your editors, select Checkout as-is, coming Unix-style line endings.
     • Configuring the terminal emulator to use with Git Base: Use Windows' default console window.
     • Configuring extra options: Select Enable symbolic links in addition to default options.
     • Configuring experimental options: Select Enable experimental support for pseudo consoles.
   • After installation, follow the First Time Git Setup Guide if this is the first time you are using Git.
3. Install Visual Studio 2022. We recommend (but not require) that you wipe out any old versions of Visual Studio (2019 and below). See Visual Studio Uninstaller for help.
   • You can use the Visual Studio Website, or Penn’s Microsoft Education Portal.
   • Make sure this ends up installing the Visual Studio Installer so you can select the packages you want.
   • Once in the installer, do the following
     • Under the Workloads tab, select Desktop Development with C++. This will select almost everything you will need.
     • Under the Individual Components Tab, make sure these packages are selected. DO NOT uncheck everything else.
       • Visual Studio 2022 (in addition to above components for 2019 which are available for VS 2022):
         • MSVC v142 - VS 2019 C++ x64/x86 build tools - Allows you to build VS 2019 projects using VS 2022
         • C++ ATL for v141 build tools (x86 & x64)
         • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.17763.0)
         • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.18362.0)
         • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.19041.0)
         • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.22621.0)
         • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.22000.0)
         • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.20348.0)
4. Install the latest version of CUDA (minimum version CUDA 13).
5. Install Nsight Compute, Nsight Graphics, and Nsight Systems from https://developer.nvidia.com/nsight-tools-visual-studio-integration.
6. Install CMake 4.x. Windows binaries are under Binary distributions.
7. Install Visual C++ Redistributable 2015/17/19/22. Note: there are 2 different install files for 2015/17/19/22 and for 2013 - you need to install 2015/17/19/22.
8. (Optional) Download GPU-Z. You can either install it, or run it as a portable executable. This provides useful information about your GPU and technologies it supports.

Enable GPU Performance Counters

When running profiling, the Nsight tools need access to systems level counters to trace the performance. There are two options to do this:

1. Run the program as admin, which is tedious to set up each time.
2. Enable Performance counters using NVIDIA Control Panel (Recommended).

The steps to enable this are:

1. Open NVIDIA Control Panel. This can be done from the start menu, the taskbar NVIDIA icon, or Control Panel.
2. On the menu bar (top), select Desktop -> Enable Developer Settings.
3. On the left side panel, you will now see Developer -> Manage GPU Performance Counter. Change the option to Allow access to the GPU performance counters to all users.

See NVIDIA Documentation for more.

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