GTX 970 gray screen during gameplay

So I’ve been playing League consistently since 8.0 with a Zotac GTX 970 graphics card and haven’t really had any issues until recently when the card will let me play for about 2 or 3 matches before starting to receive a gray screen mid-gameplay only to have to wait for Windows to recover from the issue. I did some digging and found out that nvlddmd.sys (or something very close to that, I’m not at the PC while posting this) has been crashing during gameplay. I suspect that League of Legends does not directly interact with NVIDIA’s driver API otherwise this would likely not be an issue should the game hand off as much as it could to the NVIDIA driver instead of handling graphics settings within League itself. But as far as I can infer without knowing technical details, I can only narrow this down to either be a temperature or memory issue. The GTX 970 series was gimped after launch due to an issue with 0.75GB of VRAM and I think League is trying to access that last gigabyte of VRAM unknowingly and hitting this issue, though I could be wrong.

Temperatures stay between 35°C and 75°C from power on through League gameplay.

VRAM usage spikes above 70% on occasion with League on medium/high/very high graphics settings - which can all cause the issue.

Two ways to temporarily fix; restart the PC/wait for Windows to restart the driver, or turn graphics down to very low or else just low.

Note; this didn’t start happening to me until after 9.22, the current version of the League client seems to be having this issue and I haven’t done too much to the card except apply new thermal paste on the cooler and cpu and reseat it on the motherboard with the gray screen issue still occurring and windows reporting a driver error.