nvcc

nvcc is the main wrapper for the NVIDIA CUDA Compiler suite and used to compile and link both host and GPU code. For nvcc's compiler support, check this, compute ability support, check this.

The process of compiling is divided into two steps: nvcc/clang generate virtual GPU architecture code, i.e., PTX; then ptxas (the PTX optimizing assembler) will compile PTX into the SASS, the actual GPU machine code. -arch compute_xx specifies the what type of PTX code will be generated while -code sm_xx specifies the what type of SASS code will be generated. Since GPU driver supports JIT-Compile, it can compile PTXinto SASS during running.

References:
stackoverflow;
NVIDIA CUDA Compiler Driver NVCC.