Poor Fading?

Banding happens in 8 bit color depth, when you have only 256 discrete steps from 0 to 255.

If you're working in 16 bit depth in Photoshop, any banding you see is in your display system. That could be a defective monitor profile, a buggy video driver, calibration tables in the video card, or the display panel itself.

Photoshop uses a lot of hardware/software components other applications don't. For instance, many image viewers aren't color managed and don't use the monitor profile.

Banding is cumulative, and if several sources of banding pile on top of each other, the result can be highly irregular banding with color bands.

The only way to avoid banding completely is to work in 16 bit depth and use an (expensive) 10-bit capable monitor. A laptop display is never 10 bit capable, in fact most of them are 6 bit with dithering to simulate 8 bit depth.

The standard way to hide banding is to add a tiny bit of noise, not a lot, just enough to break the banding up. This is also why you usually don't see it in photographs, only synthetic gradients made with the gradient tool. A photograph will almost always have enough noise to conceal any banding.

Could you please post a screenshot taken at View > 100% with the pertinent Panels (Toolbar, Layers, Channels, Options Bar, …) visible? 

That could indicate an issue with color profiles, hardware acceleration and general display settings. Impossible to tell you where to start since you haven't provided any info about your system and those settings.

Mylenium