BUG: (PC) BF4 stucks during gameplay, the in game CPU counter goes through the sky

System

Windows 8.1 EE x64 EN all current updates

ASUS RADEON 7970 DIRECT CU II

AMD most recent Radeon BETA drivers (14.1) - with standard settings and turned of Hydravision (due to several issues coming from that)

MD230x3 (DP) + 930BF (DVI) as monitors (all with their max resolution)

i-7 950 (standard settings) on ASUS X58 Sabertooth (most recent BIOS, all drivers are current)

Razer Imperator Mouse & Razer Megalodon as Headset (both most recent drivers)

24GB RAM, Raid0 SSD Samsung 840 Pro, Raid 50 8TB HDs

The game is installed on the SSDs, but that doesn't matter in terms of the issue

BF4

All settings to Ultra, Antialising off, Audio to Wartapes

for diagnostic reasons, the following user.cfg

Problem

While playing, since the January update (Mantle), and equally whether Mantle or DirectX is the renderer, the game stucks under certain circumstands. It doesn't matter whether it is dying, sometimes just change in weather, explosions, no or much action.

After using the user.cfg as stated above, I found two things:

1. CPU spikes exsting during level change, they often explode of the screen. CPU spikes as well happen when scenery changes, e.g. visual effects happen the first time in game at a specific location (which is random!). Second time the same effect happens, everything is fine (at the same location). However, setting everything to low, middle, Ultra, High, etc. doesn't change anything here.
   
   Interesting is, that only the in-game CPU counter explodes, the Task-Manager stays 'constant' between 52% to 59% for BF4 and all over the system doesn't go above 65%. - The issue is also Virus-Scanner or Windows-Firewall independent.
   
   Framerate is between 15 FPS (Spikes) and 190 FPS 
   
   
2. During game-play, it is quite difficult to nail it down, often visual effects appearing the first time create CPU spikes while GPU is constant and Framerate caps down to 1 <= 15FPS while during game-play with max settings, I observe 70 FPS to 130 FPS.
   
   

The whole issue is Mantle independent - in terms of what I can say from outside - on this system Mantle only gets me about 3% to 5% less CPU usage (Taskmanager) and the game is about 5 FPS to max. 10 FPS faster (which is quite difficult to measure in Multiplayer). In campaign mode, the numbers are pretty equal in simliar situations.

Interesting is also that same settings but modern i5-4430 on ASUS Z87K with 32GB RAM, same GFX and only one Samsung 840 Pro, I see the same issues, but they are less annoying - Spikes do still exist but framerate drops only to ~40 FPS, seldom less. - I first thought that maybe PCI2 vs. PCI3 maybe the problem, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I also do not believe that 7970 memory (3GB) is part of the issue; I come to this conclusion since even on low-graphics settings, the issue persists.

The spikes can be seen only in game, the task manager shows constant CPU rates, setting is to 1s. Even Sysinternal Tools show no spike in processor, disk or other system resource usage during the stucking issue. Also, the memory consumption of the whole system as well as BF4 is stable (the latter is always around 1.5GB). Both systems do have way enough memory left over.

Maybe I am not the only one having this issue and hopefully someone has an idea or solution for it.

if you (EA/DICE) need more information, please let me know.