When every millisecond matters. Build reaction-time and perception experiments with timing precision ordinary software can’t touch — and still never write a line of code.
DirectRT v2027 is the first complete rewrite since the 1990s — rebuilt on modern Windows APIs, fully backward compatible, and finally free to grow again. A few of the highlights:
Present PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, WebP and more as stimuli — no conversion gymnastics, no unsupported-file surprises.
Display foreign scripts and true right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, rendered natively — no workarounds.
Refreshed trigger output for EEG, eye-tracking, and psychophysiology — cleaner, more reliable integration for the hardware crowd.
Fully rewritten on current Windows graphics APIs — faster, sharper, and ready for whatever comes next.
Your existing DirectRT experiments, stimulus files, and data run as-is — nothing to rebuild.
Crisp stimulus rendering on modern high-resolution and multi-display setups, with precise control over which screen shows what.
DirectRT is built entirely on DirectX and synchronizes stimulus presentation and response capture to the actual screen refresh. That closes the 10–17 ms window of random error that creeps into experiments run on general-purpose tools — so your effects aren’t buried in measurement noise.
Lay out trials, stimuli, and timing in a familiar grid. If you can build a table, you can build an experiment.
Precise prime durations, backward masks, and SOAs down to a single frame — exactly as your design specifies.
Classic cognitive paradigms — lexical decision, Stroop, flanker, go/no-go — ship-ready in minutes.
Threshold, detection, and discrimination tasks with frame-accurate stimulus control.
Present images, sound, and video as stimuli, with response windows keyed to onset.
Trial-by-trial latencies and accuracy in a single file, ready to merge across machines and drop into SPSS.
Need consent forms, questionnaires, and debriefing around your RT task? Let MediaLab handle the survey flow and hand off to DirectRT for the precision trials. Subject and condition IDs travel automatically, and everything writes to one coherent dataset.
Weighing it against something else? We keep an honest comparison with E-Prime, Inquisit, PsychoPy, Gorilla and our own MediaLab — including where we’d point you elsewhere.
Download the full version free for 30 days, or ask us for a quote. No subscription, no maintenance fees.