Massive artifacting issue with any dark areas on any image displayed on my desktop

[Cyber Akuma]

Massive artifacting issue with any dark areas on any image displayed on my desktop  
 
My computer is an i7-3770K running two EVGA GTX 670 FTW cards in SLI and Windows 10.  
 
I am not sure how long this has been going, but it appears to have started a few days ago as this is when I first noticed it. At first I assumed it was an issue of badly compressed video since I was watching livestreams at the time and thought the video was not being compressed well or my connection was being poor. But I have been noticing it more and more all over YouTube... and now finally after testing I realized that it's not even limited to video, on top of movies themselves also showing this issue, even still images show it.
 
I tried displaying those same videos and images on my laptop, and they looked fine there! But on my desktop anything with any dark gradients look horrific.
 
Here are two example images:
 
https://i.imgur.com/A3Ve2Vm.jpg
 
https://i.imgur.com/fJEqc4z.jpg
 
On my laptop, and for anyone else I asked to look at those links, they look fine.
 
But when I view them on my desktop... well, here's photos of that I took with my smartphone:
 
https://i.imgur.com/77zwrAv.jpg
 
https://i.imgur.com/NpUqM7N.jpg
 
I have no idea what is causing this. My video drivers haven't changed and I have disabled Automatic Updates in Windows 10 since I prefer to install them manually, so it couldn't have been a new driver or OS update.
 
I did install an app designed to trim MP4 files, but I uninstalled it, and it didn't seem to have modified my codecs... plus even if it did, that would not explain why even still images are displaying this issue, it would only occur in video.
 
It's driving me nuts how horrible everything looks on my desktop, especially since I watch a lot of streaming video on it. I have already tried resetting my Windows and Nvidia Control Panel settings to default, as well as updating my GPU drivers and even changing my refresh rate just to see if anything fixes it, and nothing.
 
To make sure it's my desktop and not my monitor, I also tried connecting my desktop by HDMI to my TV, as well as connecting my laptop by that same HDMI to my monitor and to my TV. The results were pretty conclusive, the image always showed the artifacting when displayed off my desktop, and didn't show artifacting when displaying off my laptop.
 
Any ideas where I can even begin trying to figure out what's wrong?

[Mando]

suspect an NVidia driver issue, the latest drivers cause a loss of video/audio sync for me on streamed sites. 

 

 

 

 

[Cyber Akuma]

2 minutes ago, Mando said:

suspect an NVidia driver issue, the latest drivers cause a loss of video/audio sync for me on streamed sites. 

 

 

 

 

 

I was on some very old (Last July or so) drivers when I started having this issue. I doubted it was the drivers since it just started happening about a week ago, but I tried updating to the latest version anyway, it didn't help.

 

Also as I said, this isn't just happening to video, even still photographs or playing a movie off of a Blu-Ray disk has the same issue.

[Mando]

12 minutes ago, Cyber Akuma said:

 

I was on some very old (Last July or so) drivers when I started having this issue. I doubted it was the drivers since it just started happening about a week ago, but I tried updating to the latest version anyway, it didn't help.

 

Also as I said, this isn't just happening to video, even still photographs or playing a movie off of a Blu-Ray disk has the same issue.

Could be the cards, whip em out and make sure they are all nice and clean, no dust bunnies etc.

[Ve7878]

Have you tried doing a factory reset on your monitor's settings?

[Cyber Akuma]

On 12/14/2017 at 5:10 AM, Mando said:

Could be the cards, whip em out and make sure they are all nice and clean, no dust bunnies etc.

If it was my cards though, woudlen't the effect not be consistent if I resized the images or moved around?

 

2 hours ago, Vince800 said:

Have you tried doing a factory reset on your monitor's settings?

I don't think it's my monitor since when I plugged my desktop to my TV the issue was still there, and plugging my laptop into my monitor the issue was not there.

[+Warwagon MVC]

That photo looks cool!