I'm having the exact same issue, and I've basically gone through the same checklist you did. I'm on a 7945HX and an RTX 5060, and this has never happened in any other game. It only happens in Battlefield 2042/6, which really points to the engine. I'm a software engineer, so while I can't pinpoint the exact root cause, I can at least say it's not the EA app or Steam I've had the freeze on both, across both games. It's also not power draw I tried locking the game at 120 fps on the lowest settings, no change. I doubt it's Windows, but who knows since windows is hot garbage still, it's happened across multiple driver and windows updates although microsoft's engineers are absolutely dogwater at their job I doubt it's 100% related, although I've never had such issue gaming on Linux, but that's another discussion. It occurs in regular MP on any map or mode, and in RedSec too. I found no pattern, though for me it often happens right after dying.
From what I can tell, the only realistic causes are things like this:
The game might be sending invalid or unsynchronized DX12 commands that the GPU driver can't recover from, which can hard-freeze both AMD and NVIDIA cards.
A shader or compute pass might be deadlocking the GPU, so the driver can't preempt it and Windows can't reset the device.
The engine might be corrupting GPU memory or descriptors, which can instantly break the display engine or command processor and cause a black-screen freeze.
It could be triggering a bug in the Windows graphics kernel (dxgkrnl, WDDM), which both vendors rely on, so a cross-vendor freeze makes sense if the game hits a bad path.
Or there's a rare interaction with the anti-cheat kernel driver that ends up deadlocking the system and mimics a GPU hang.
These are basically the only explanations that actually fit the symptoms.
