.. SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Copyright (c) 2025-2026 NVIDIA CORPORATION & AFFILIATES. All rights reserved.
.. SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

.. module:: cuda.bindings

``cuda-bindings`` 12.9.3 Release notes
======================================

Released on Oct 9, 2025


Highlights
----------

* This is the last release that officially supports Python 3.9.
* Python 3.14 is supported.
* **Experimental** free-threaded builds for Python 3.13/3.14 are made available. Any bugs can be reported to `our GitHub repo <https://github.com/NVIDIA/cuda-python>`_. More details are available in our :ref:`support` docs.
* Automatic CUDA library path detection based on ``CUDA_HOME``, eliminating the need to manually set ``LIBRARY_PATH`` environment variables for installation.
* The Python overhead of calling functions in CUDA bindings in ``driver``, ``runtime`` and ``nvrtc`` has been reduced by approximately 30%.
* On Windows, the ``pywin32`` dependency has been removed. The necessary Windows API functions are now accessed directly.
* Updated the ``cuda.bindings.runtime`` module to statically link against the CUDA Runtime library from CUDA Toolkit 12.9.1.
* ``cyruntime.getLocalRuntimeVersion`` now uses pathfinder to find the CUDA runtime.


Known issues
------------

* Updating from older versions (v12.6.2.post1 and below) via ``pip install -U cuda-python`` might not work. Please do a clean re-installation by uninstalling ``pip uninstall -y cuda-python`` followed by installing ``pip install cuda-python``.
* The graphics APIs in ``cuda.bindings.runtime`` are inadvertently disabled in 12.9.3.  Users needing these APIs should update to 12.9.4.
