"MDK" was designed at a time when 3D gaming was becoming popular, but GPUs hadn't had much of an impact on game development, and as such, "graphics would be designed to operate in software." Ultimately, the initial release of the game relied wholly on software rendering, without any additional GPU requirements. The game's original system requirements were a 60 MHz Pentium (although 90 MHz was recommended), 16MB of RAM, 17MB of hard drive storage for basic installation (37MB for full installation), an SVGA compatible video card, and a Sound Blaster or equivalent sound card; very basic specs even for the time. However, patches were later released that added support for then-popular 3D APIs.