Gaming Mode

OLED Guard Pro is designed to keep working inside borderless fullscreen games — the mode most modern PC games run in. Two factory presets, Gaming — Fast and Gaming — Slow, are tuned for the two ends of the gaming spectrum.

The two gaming presets

Gaming — Fast

Tuned for multiplayer and esports: short accumulation window, quick decay, low maximum dim. Picks up new static HUDs quickly but never gets in the way of a fast-paced scene.

  • High capture FPS so transient HUD flashes register
  • Low dim cap so dark scenes (caves, night maps) stay clean
  • High dynamism gate — only the most persistent static regions get protected

Gaming — Slow

Tuned for cinematic single-player RPGs: longer accumulation, slower decay, higher dim ceiling. Tolerant of long static menus and cutscenes.

  • Lower capture FPS — fine for content that moves slowly
  • Higher dim cap for the long static map screens common in this genre
  • Lower dynamism gate — more permissive about what counts as static

Both presets ship with Auto Mode on and the High quality preset.

Game IQ: learned game HUDs

New in v5. On top of the base engine, Game IQ learns the HUD regions that stay put in each game and brings protection back to them faster the next time they appear, so you are not waiting for risk to re-accumulate after a goal, a menu, or a respawn.

  • Gated to gameplay. Game IQ only learns and applies its floor in the Gaming preset plus fullscreen. Your desktop, media, and menus never pick up a game-HUD floor by mistake.
  • A one-way floor. It can only add protection on top of what the base engine already decided. It never lowers protection, and it falls back to the base engine whenever it is unsure.
  • Local and private. Learning runs on your PC and the learned HUD set is stored locally. Nothing about what you play leaves the machine.
  • Hardened against false positives. Size caps reject whole panels that are not HUDs, and small regions that turn out not to be HUDs are retired once real HUDs are confirmed.

Reset and factory reset clear the learned HUD files. For the full technical story, see the Game IQ page.

Setting up a gaming session

  1. Open the dashboard and navigate to the Overlay page
  2. Pick Gaming — Fast or Gaming — Slow from the preset list
  3. (Optional) Set up an App Profile so the right preset loads automatically when your game becomes the foreground window — see App Profiles

Fullscreen compatibility

  • Borderless fullscreen — fully supported. The overlay composites on top of the game through DWM, with no swap-chain interference.
  • Exclusive (legacy) fullscreen - the overlay physically cannot display over true exclusive fullscreen, and the app says so honestly instead of pretending protection is active. The engine detects the occlusion, pauses rendering to save GPU and power, and resumes automatically when you alt-tab out.
  • Multi-monitor gaming — each display has its own pipeline, so your side monitors stay protected while you game on the primary.
  • HDR / G-Sync / FreeSync — all work; the overlay is a DWM-composited layer rather than a swap-chain hook.

Ignore Active Window

If you don't want any overlay on the game window itself — useful for screenshot purity or when the overlay is just visible enough to bother you in dark scenes — turn on Ignore Active Window. Protection on every other monitor continues normally; the foreground game gets passed through untouched.

This setting is on by default in the productivity presets and off in both gaming presets.

Performance impact

The hot path runs entirely on the GPU:

  • Capture uses Windows Graphics Capture or DXGI Desktop Duplication (both hardware-accelerated)
  • Per-pixel exposure modelling and the overlay shader both run as compute / pixel shaders
  • Quality presets (Low / Medium / High / Ultra) let you trade detection resolution against frame budget

In typical use, less than 1% GPU overhead measured in real benchmarks. The cost is paid in parallel with your game's render, not in serial.

Hotkeys worth knowing while gaming

  • Ctrl+Shift+O — toggle protection on/off without leaving the game
  • Ctrl+Shift+− / Ctrl+Shift+= — nudge protection intensity down/up
  • Ctrl+Shift+H - toggle the overlay-dim heat view (what the overlay is actually dimming)
  • Ctrl+Shift+J - toggle the developer/debug heat view (the raw risk the engine is tracking; a diagnostics tool)
  • Ctrl+Shift+V — toggle vignette edge protection

All hotkeys are configurable from the Hotkeys page.

Protection ModesMulti-Monitor Setup