As this issue seems to have been resolved with new drivers I'll mark this thread as solved now.
I wanted to add this valid piece of info to the thread. Just prior to the release of BF4 (about a month) I was having the exact same issues in BF3. Mind you, the EXACT same behavior (memory totally pegged out, NP Pool referenced as the contributor to RAM usage, game stutters, frame rates drop, game will eventually crash). I could watch (using Task Manager) when maps would load (in between rounds) whether or not the bug was going to effect my next round of play. This has carried over to BF4, where I experience very similar issues. The only difference I've noticed is the memory leak in BF4 will happen in the middle of game play. I have yet to visually watch the leak occur when the map changes as I could in BF3. Another difference I noticed is I could get in a few rounds of BF3 after the leak had begun. My memory would slowly fill up after a few rounds until all of my RAM was in use. In BF4 it seems to happen all at once durring a single round for me. The only way to free the memory up is to reboot the system entirely (as you have already pointed out).
I have found some relief recently by running the BF4 x86 client in Win 7 compatibility mode. Though my play sessions haven't stretched beyond 1.5 hours of consecutive play.
My onboard NIC, which I don't make use of, is Intel. I use a Cisco usb wireless dongle for network connectivity. There aren't any drivers available from Intel for Windows 8.1, or 8 for that matter. So the report of Realtek NIC drivers being the underlying cause doesn't apply to me.
I hope my insight is helpful in some way.
My config is:
i7 920
128 Curcial M4
16GB DDR3
Radeon HD 6870 - Beta 13.11 drivers
Win 8.1 x64
Same problem happend and happening to me like drewfus137.
Memory leak just happend without known reasen to me when I played BF3 befor BF4 was launched. I played BF3 on WIN7 64 bit long time without any problems a long time, but with same hardware like now I'm playing BF4 Premium.
I moved from WIN 7 to WIN 8 and then to WIN 8.1. Problem stays almost the same, memory leaks happening all over again, no matter what I change.
My rig:
ASUS P7Z68 PRO-V (updated drivers - Intel net drivers)
8 GB RAM
XFX 6870 1Gb
Windows 8.1
Firefox (updated)
3 months in........... still not able to play the game
