NVIDIA cuQuantum has a strong reputation as the natural high-performance baseline for GPU quantum simulation. That reputation is understandable: cuQuantum contains serious low-level GPU libraries such as cuStateVec and cuTensorNet and it is NVIDIA who creates GPU and CUDA!
But in an end-to-end differentiable VQE workload, the result is more nuanced. On our H200 GPU benchmark, TensorCircuit-NG was substantially faster after compilation, while also offering a much higher-level and user-friendly programming model.
The short version:
cuQuantum is a powerful low-level library.
It is not automatically the fastest route for practical quantum simulation tasks.
