Conda + NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit is a transformative combination for GPU-accelerated software development. It lowers the barrier to entry dramatically and brings real reproducibility to a historically messy domain. The pain points—driver mismatches, disk bloat, and nvcc headaches—are manageable with proper practices. For the vast majority of data scientists and AI engineers, Conda is the best way to manage CUDA dependencies today. Just remember: Conda gives you the libraries, but the driver is still on you.

You can maintain multiple environments on a single machine, each with a different version of CUDA (e.g., v11.8 for one project and v12.1 for another).

Before installing anything, you must distinguish between the and the CUDA Toolkit .