Screen banding problems

So, was playing a game of League of Legends tonight, went well, go off to make some food, come back (note, nothing at all has happened to the laptop) go into game and suddenly all the shadows look terrible.

Look into the problems, maybe it was my eyes, maybe just Flux causing problems, turns out there is something wrong with the colour profile in windows with drivers installed, when I boot into safe mode and look at a simple black to white gradient, there is obvious low bit banding, but there is an even gradient, when looking at the same image with drivers loaded, it looks something like this http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/img/gradient-h-banding-dith.png

I felt like going to windows 8 anyway, formatted and moved to 8, and for a month or two not a single problem, until about an hour ago where it has happened again. I don't have a clue what could have caused it before and now it just seemed to happen out of the blue, not really in the mood to re install windows and I cannot for the life of me find the root of the problem.

• Reinstalling drivers does not make a difference
• Booting with Intel HD4000 does remove the problem, booting back into the 7970M the problem occurs again
• I haven't touched colour profiles at all so it cannot be that

It may be my graphics card, I am getting often artifacts when playing League of Legends, but not in any other game, so I was thinking its just poor coding

Could any of you throw me a helping hand? its pretty annoying not being able to only use the 7970M

Thanks, Joe

 

Ok, so I just plugged my second monitor into my laptop and the problem has gone, no banding

But the question still stands, what is causing the problem in the first place?