Protection Modes
OLED Guard Pro draws one continuous, content-aware protection field (see How the engine works). You can choose between two visual finishes for that field. The finish changes appearance only: detection, responsiveness, protection strength, and average attenuation remain the same. In fullscreen games, Game IQ can add a learned protection floor for recurring HUD regions.
Fine Grain (Recommended)
The default finish adds a subtle moving texture to the adaptive dimming.
- Multi-octave blue-noise sampling avoids obvious repeating structures
- Spatial decorrelation keeps neighbouring areas from moving as one flat sheet
- Gentle motion helps soften visible banding and contouring
- Speed and scale are tuned automatically rather than exposed as protection controls
Best for: Most use cases, especially when a textured finish makes adaptive boundaries less noticeable.
Smooth
A clean, texture-free finish for the same protection field.
- Even attenuation with no visible grain
- No finish animation
- Uses the same risk map and protection strength as Fine Grain
Best for: Users who prefer a flat, quiet appearance over subtle moving texture.
What happened to Pixel Shift and Ordered Dither?
They were retired as OLED Guard finishes. The old Pixel Shift option changed the overlay texture but did not move the displayed image, so its name promised behavior the app did not perform. Ordered Dither was a visible Bayer pattern without a distinct detection or protection model. Existing settings using either option migrate safely to Fine Grain.
This does not refer to the pixel-shift feature built into some OLED monitors and TVs. Keep your display's own OLED-care features enabled; our pixel-shift comparison explains how that firmware-level feature complements content-aware protection.
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.
Autopilot
Autopilot is one global preset-control feature. It runs a closed-loop controller that adapts the active preset, responsiveness, and engine tuning to what is actually on screen. It does not change your global Intensity or Overlay finish.
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 the appropriate preset and timing parameters. You can watch its current classification and live targets on the Advanced page. Responsiveness Auto resolves to Responsive for fast games, Balanced for work and slower games, and Relaxed for media; every tier releases promptly when content changes.
Dark Mode
Autopilot 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. Dark Mode always renders Smooth, while preserving your regular Fine Grain or Smooth choice for when you leave; tint and vignette still apply.
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.)