# Loading image data to GPU
**URL:** https://discourse.vtk.org/t/loading-image-data-to-gpu/12316
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [September 19, 2023, 8:59am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/loading-image-data-to-gpu/12316 "2023-09-19T08:59:14Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@dbtruong](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/dbtruong)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2023, 8:59am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/loading-image-data-to-gpu/12316/1 "2023-09-19T08:59:14Z")
Hello all
For example I have 1000 dicom images. When I read that image folder into the pipeline for 3D rendering, how much resources will it take to load image data into the GPU?
---
### Author:  [@lassoan](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/lassoan)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2023, 2:30am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/loading-image-data-to-gpu/12316/2 "2023-09-20T02:30:33Z")
DICOM files are usually not compressed, so the images will use similar amount of memory of the GPU as the total size of the files on disk.
Clinical 3D images (CT, MRI, US, PET) are usually easily handled on all modern GPUs. Size of microCT, microscopy, etc. images can be tens of gigabytes, so they may exceed your GPU memory size and rendering at high resolution can be slow.
---
### Author:  [@dbtruong](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/dbtruong)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2023, 4:50am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/loading-image-data-to-gpu/12316/3 "2023-09-20T04:50:30Z")
For example, I have 1000 CT dicom images of 512x512, 16 bits per pixel. How much resources will it take to load image data into the GPU?
In theory, it should be 1000 \* 512 \* 512 \* 32 = 1GB
---
### Author:  [@lassoan](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/lassoan)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2023, 1:36pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/loading-image-data-to-gpu/12316/4 "2023-09-20T13:36:42Z")
Don’t worry too much about memory usage. If you work with images that are too large to comfortably fit in memory then you have a whole lot of other, more complex problems to solve.
---
### Author:  [@dbtruong](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/dbtruong)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2023, 1:48am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/loading-image-data-to-gpu/12316/5 "2023-09-21T01:48:20Z")
@lassoan Thanks for your answer