This .zip archive contains DLL libraries and the associated header (.h) and module-definition (.def) files of FFTW compiled for Win32. It also contains the corresponding bench.exe test/benchmark programs and wisdom utilities. There are three libraries: single precision (float), double precision, and extended precision (long double). To use the third library, your compiler must have sizeof(long double) == 12. In order to link to these .dll files from Visual C++, you need to create .lib "import libraries" for them, and can do so with the "lib" command that comes with VC++. In particular, run: lib /def:libfftw3-3.def lib /def:libfftw3f-3.def lib /def:libfftw3l-3.def The single- and double-precision libraries use SSE and SSE2, respectively, but should also work on older processors (the library checks at runtime to see whether SSE/SSE2 is supported and disables the relevant code if not). They were compiled by the GNU C compiler for MinGW, specifically: i586-mingw32msvc-gcc (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw special)