Protection Modes
OLED Guard Pro offers four overlay modes, each with different visual characteristics and effectiveness. In v5 the chosen mode shapes a single continuous protection field (see How the engine works), and in fullscreen games Game IQ adds a learned protection floor on top.
Noise (Recommended)
The default and most effective mode. Renders an animated blue-noise pattern that exercises OLED sub-pixels subtly over time.
- Multi-octave sampling for natural-looking patterns
- Spatially decorrelated across screen regions
- Time-varying motion prevents the overlay itself from causing burn-in
- Adjustable speed and scale
Best for: All use cases. The noise pattern is subtle enough to be nearly invisible at low intensities.
Static
A uniform flat overlay that dims the screen evenly.
- Simplest mode — applies consistent dimming everywhere
- No animation or movement
- Lowest GPU usage
Best for: Simple dimming when you just want to reduce overall brightness.
Pixel Shift
Subtly shifts content by 1-2 pixels in a circular pattern over time.
- Prevents static content from staying in exactly the same position
- Very subtle — most users won't notice it
- Works alongside other modes
Best for: Supplementary protection — combines well with Noise mode.
Dithering
An animated Bayer matrix dithering pattern.
- Ordered dithering creates a structured overlay
- Animated to prevent static patterns
- More visible than Noise but effective at lower intensities
Best for: Users who prefer structured patterns over organic noise.
Zone merging (formerly the Noise Gap Filter)
Older versions exposed a "Noise Gap Filter" setting (Off / Smooth / Neighborhood / Morphological) that decided what to do with the small empty regions left between noise samples. As of 4.5 that control is gone: a rewritten comfort-merge pass blends protection zones into one cohesive field automatically, with far less visible grain and speckle, and there is nothing left to tune.
Automatic Mode
Instead of locking in a fixed mode, Automatic Mode runs a closed-loop controller that adjusts protection parameters in real time based on what's actually on screen. Every factory preset ships with Auto Mode on by default.
The controller reads:
- Per-pixel dynamism — the live motion envelope of what the GPU is seeing, not a crude screen average
- Screen luma — global brightness, used to scale risk against perceptibility
- Scene classification — work, gaming, video, or idle, inferred from the dynamism trace
- Stability floor + scene-reset gate — prevents Auto from over-reacting to brief transients (a window opening, a brief notification) and prevents under-reacting after a real scene change
Based on those signals it continuously adjusts intensity, accumulation/recovery rates, and the overlay mode itself. You can watch all of this happen on the Advanced page: every knob exposes its live target value plus a 60 Hz trace of the controller's reasoning.
Dark Mode
Automatic Mode adapts protection to what is on screen. Dark Mode is the opposite choice: a preset that holds one uniform dim across the whole screen at a darkness you set, with Autopilot off, until you switch back to an adaptive preset. It still wears your chosen overlay mode (Noise, Pixel Shift, and so on), tint, and vignette on top of that uniform floor.
It is the simple, predictable option when you just want a steady dim, and it persists across restarts. See Settings for the darkness control and saving custom Dark Mode variants. (Dark Mode is a burn-in protection preset, not the app's light/dark UI theme.)