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. Every one of them has Auto Mode on and the High quality preset by default.

You can also save your own preset from the Overlay page. 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 composes your overlay choices: tint, overlay type (Noise, Pixel Shift, and so on), and vignette all still apply on top of the uniform dim.
• 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 response scale. Most users only ever touch this slider.
• Responsiveness (Auto / Relaxed / Balanced / Responsive) - one control for how fast protection ramps up after the screen changes and how fast it eases back off. Auto follows the active preset; the finer accumulation and decay constants below stay available for manual tuning.
• 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

• Mode — Noise (default), Static Dim, Pixel Shift, or Ordered Dither
• Noise speed / scale — animation rate and feature size of the noise pattern
• Vignette — independent edge weighting per side (left / top / right / bottom) layered on top of the chosen mode

Overlay colour

Seven dark tints to choose from on the Overlay page:

• Black — pure dimming, no subpixel wear
• Dark Gray — softer contrast than black
• Dark Blue — exercises short-lived blue subpixels
• Dark Red — night-vision safe
• Dark Amber — warm, blue-light free
• Dark Green — highest lumens per photon
• Dark Teal — balanced blue-green

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) - selects Windows Graphics Capture on Windows 11, Desktop Duplication otherwise
• WGC - Windows Graphics Capture; keeps capturing at full rate inside fullscreen games where Desktop Duplication could be starved
• Desktop Duplication - the classic DXGI capture path, for systems where WGC is unavailable

Whichever method is active, 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), switches to a uniform low-dim hold until you come back. Off by default; toggle on the Settings page.