Tips for the installation of CUDA, Cudnn and tensorflow for windows 11

Today is 2023/10/11 and the content largely relates to the time of writing. 

1. check website: Build from source on Windows  |  TensorFlow , scroll down and check out this chart:

so from the graph we can know that the highest supporting version of python is 2.10.0, meaning that when installing anaconda or miniconda, we can try installing an older version corresponding to python 2.10.0. 

2. please be aware of the CUDA version and cuDNN version available, the 11.2 here basically indicates that any version higher and still belonging to the 11.x class is available. (12.x class will invoke errors such as naming errors). Download archive versions here: CUDA Toolkit Archive | NVIDIA Developer

By the way certain versions of CUDA do not support win 11, for instance the 11.2 in the above graph, so I installed 11.5. And even if you select the one supporting, the zip file naming may still include win10 instead of win11. 

3. visual studio 2022 is ok, no need to install visual studio 2017 just to fit the requirements. 

4. for cuDNN, select one that matches. If you wanna be conservative, note that 2 cudnn versions correspond to 1 CUDA version, and the release time should be basically 1 months later. One can deduce the corresponding cuDNN package by simple counting. Download archive versions here:

cuDNN Archive | NVIDIA Developer

5. do not use "pip install tensorflow", this will give you the tensorflow cpu version, and even if you install the gpu version, it will not show up in the conda list. So the correct way is to use "pip install tensorflow-gpu==2.10.0" or something like this, I don't remember exactly. 

6. If you happen to have used the "pip install tensorflow" and "pip install tensorflow-gpu", then do uninstall both: "pip uninstall tensorflow" "pip uninstall tensorflow-gpu" and then reinstall tensorflow-gpu solely. 

7. During the installing, I referred to youTube video   Setting Up CUDA, CUDNN, Keras, and TensorFlow on Windows 11 for GPU Deep Learning - YouTubeand CSDN article 【Windows11】Cuda和Cudnn详细安装教程-CSDN博客

There are conflicts between what I said and the youTube video, in that case, follow my instructions.  

8. It seems to be fine for cuda and cudnn not appearing in the conda list, as long as other methods of verification proves their existence. But I have come across cases where they do appear.