Protection Modes

OLED Guard Pro offers four overlay modes, each with different visual characteristics and effectiveness.

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.

Noise Gap Filter

A sub-control of the Noise overlay that decides what to do with the small empty regions left between noise samples. Higher modes produce a more cohesive overlay at slightly more GPU cost.

  • Off — raw noise pattern as-is, cheapest option, no extra GPU work
  • Smooth — smoothstep sharpens borderline values toward 0 or 1, effectively free
  • Neighborhood — local 8-sample risk vote biases the threshold to local context, very cheap
  • Morphological (default) — 3×3 close + open pass fills holes and trims islands, the most accurate option and what every factory preset ships with

You can change this from the Overlay page or via Advanced.

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, the noise-gap filter, 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.

How the engine worksGaming Mode