Settings & Hotkeys

OLED Guard Pro is built around a small set of presets that cover the common cases, with knobs underneath for anyone who wants to tune further.

Built-in presets

Six factory presets ship with the app. They define protection tuning; Autopilot is one global control, and factory quality defaults to High.

After tuning the Overlay or Advanced pages, you can duplicate or save a custom preset from the Dashboard. Custom presets are stored as JSON in %LOCALAPPDATA%\OLEDGuard\ and can be exported/imported.

The Gaming presets also drive Game IQ: in a fullscreen game it learns where each game keeps its HUD and brings protection back to those regions faster the next time they appear.

Dark Mode

Dark Mode is a preset with a different goal from the adaptive ones: instead of shaping protection to what is on screen, it holds one uniform, even dim across the whole screen at a darkness you choose. Autopilot stays off while it is active, and it keeps running until you switch back to an adaptive preset.

• Darkness is set with the Global dim control (Light / Medium / Max), which acts as the uniform floor. The 1-5 Intensity tier is hidden while Dark Mode is active, since a uniform dim has a single darkness control.
• It always renders with the Smooth finish. Your regular Fine Grain or Smooth choice stays saved and returns when you leave Dark Mode; tint and vignette still apply.
• Your choice persists across restarts, so the app comes back up in Dark Mode until you leave it. You can also save named Dark Mode variants alongside the other presets.

Dark Mode is the predictable, dark-first option. It is a burn-in protection preset, separate from the app's light/dark UI theme.

Protection knobs

Available on the Overlay page (basic) and Advanced page (full set):

• Intensity (1–5) — overall protection strength and dim ceiling. Most users only need this control.
• Responsiveness (Auto / Relaxed / Balanced / Responsive) - controls how long content must stay unchanged and how quickly protection builds. Relaxed waits longest; Responsive builds fastest. Content changes release protection promptly in every tier. Auto uses Responsive timing for fast games, Balanced for work and slower games, and Relaxed for media.
• Max dim amount — the ceiling on how dark the overlay can go.
• Stability floor — risk floor for pixels that have been static for a long time, regardless of luma.
• Dynamism gate — how much per-pixel motion is required before a pixel counts as static.
• Accumulation / decay time constants — how fast risk builds up and recovers.
• Luma floor — minimum brightness for a pixel to count toward risk accumulation.

Overlay settings

• Engine quality — controls how often and at what resolution OLED Guard captures, analyses, and presents protection. Higher settings use more GPU.
• Overlay finish — a global appearance choice that presets and Autopilot do not change. Fine Grain (recommended) adds a subtle moving, spatially decorrelated texture that softens visible banding; Smooth provides clean, even dimming with no visible texture. Both use the same detection, responsiveness, protection strength, and average attenuation.
• Vignette — independent edge weighting per side (left / top / right / bottom), layered over the protection field.

Older settings that selected Pixel Shift or Ordered Dither migrate automatically to Fine Grain. Those names no longer appear as OLED Guard finishes because the old implementations did not move the displayed content or provide a distinct protection method.

Overlay colour

Seven dark tints to choose from on the Overlay page:

• Black — neutral dimming
• Dark Gray — softer contrast than black
• Dark Blue — cool blue tint
• Dark Red — deep red tint
• Dark Amber — warm amber tint
• Dark Green — deep green tint
• Dark Teal — blue-green tint

Quality presets

Quality controls capture and render rate plus the analysis resolution. Higher = more accurate detection at higher GPU cost.

All factory presets ship at High.

Resource use

The Settings page includes a Resource use card that reports OLED Guard's own rolling CPU, GPU, and memory use in real time. If you ever wonder what the engine costs on your machine, it answers with live numbers instead of estimates.

Capture method

Set on the Settings page; controls how OLED Guard grabs frames:

• Auto (default, recommended) - prefers Desktop Duplication, the lowest-overhead path; if it cannot start, Auto may fall back to WGC on Windows 11
• WGC - an optional Windows 11 capture path to try when Desktop Duplication misbehaves in a particular game or setup
• DDC - Desktop Duplication selected explicitly instead of through Auto
• Low VRAM mode - WGC only; uses one SDR capture buffer to reduce capture memory, with lower HDR luminance accuracy
• Full-coverage overlay - covers the final screen edge, but Windows may treat it as fullscreen and enable Do Not Disturb

Changing these options applies immediately and briefly restarts protection. Frames stay in GPU memory, and if the graphics driver resets or capture dies, the engine restarts itself cleanly.

Hotkeys

Six global hotkeys, all defaulting to Ctrl+Shift+... combos and all individually rebindable from the Hotkeys page:

A separate developer/debug heat view is available on Ctrl+Shift+J: it shows the raw risk the engine is tracking, as a diagnostics tool rather than one of the standard hotkeys above.

System integration

• Start with Windows — runs OLED Guard at login via the Windows Run key. On by default for new installs.
• Start minimised to tray — when on, the app skips the dashboard window on launch and lives in the tray. On by default. The first-run welcome overlay overrides this for the very first launch.
• Window placement — the dashboard window remembers its size, position, and maximised state across launches. Restore is validated against the current monitor layout, so an unplugged display doesn't strand the window off-screen.
• Single-instance — launching a second copy raises the existing window instead of spawning a duplicate engine. Safe to leave the auto-start enabled even if you sometimes double-click the tray icon.
• System tray menu — Start/Stop Protection, Open OLED Guard Pro, Quit.
• Closing the window minimises to tray with a one-time balloon notification. Quit from the tray menu actually exits.
• Away Mode — after a configurable idle period (default 10 min), applies an 88% uniform overlay dim. Supported DDC/CI monitors also drop to 20% hardware brightness, then return to their exact previous level when you come back. A monitor already below 20% is never raised. Off by default; toggle it on the Settings page.