On the tooling side, the NVIDIA compiler (NVCC) has received optimizations that improve compile times—a quality-of-life improvement that developers will welcome during those long build cycles.
The 12.6 release focused on performance optimizations, memory management efficiency, and developer productivity tools. 1. Lazy Loading for Windows nvidia cuda 12.6 release news
you need B100/H200 support, FP8 optimizations, or C++17 default. Otherwise, 12.4/12.5 are safer for stability. On the tooling side, the NVIDIA compiler (NVCC)