Display going black and/or squished at top

I'm seeing a weird issue with my 27" iMac "Mid 2011" model, which I maxed out when I bought it (top-of-the-line i7 CPU, 2GB version of the 6970M GPU, SSD + standard HDD, etc.) and is currently running the latest Yosemite OS. As of a couple days ago, the machine will work fine for a seemingly-random period of time after boot (anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours), but then the display will either go completely black (though the backlight stays on) or (even weirder) the image will be "squished" into the top couple rows of pixels - the mouse continues to move (as best I can tell) and it seems that the machine is still functional, but the entire display is grey save for the garbled lines at the top.
In both instances nothing I do can snap it out of the issue, including using the keyboard shortcut to reboot (which doesn't seem to work when this happens). Only a hard power-down / power-up cycle gets things back to normal, and then it will happen again after another random period of time.
I strongly suspect something weird with the GPU, as I observed the same behavior while running the Disk Utility from the Recovery Partition (indicating this isn't some funky OS glitch), but I'm not at all sure. I'm going to make a Genius Bar apointment ASAP, but I'm super nervous about their likely findings, as my AppleCare ran out just a few months ago and a huge out-of-pocket repair bill would be a serious blow right now.
Any hints / theories / suggestions?

Hi there Huxley Dunsany,
Issues with your monitor image behaving unexpectedly can be pretty worrying but I feel that these instructions from the following article should provide some help:
Apple computers: Troubleshooting issues with video on internal or external displays
Reset the system
You can reset the Mac's parameter RAM and SMC.Reset the resolution
Start by resetting the Mac's parameter RAM. If the display does not come up, was previously set to an unsupported resolution, and still results in no video:
Start up in Safe Mode.
From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
Choose Displays from the View menu to open the preferences pane.
Select any resolution and refresh rate that your display supports.
Restart your computer.
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Sterling

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