As this issue seems to have been resolved with new drivers I'll mark this thread as solved now.
I honestly knew little about NPPM, except that it was there, until this problem happened. To sum up my experience: I was playing my longest continuous BF4 session yet since returning to it, and after loading up the jail map I ran around for about five minutes before suddenly my computer began obviously thrashing memory with the page file, something I could recognize as I hadn't gotten beyond 4GB of physical RAM until recently.
I assumed it was a background program, alt-tabbed to find out what had started up, discovered BF4 was using only 1GB at the time (server kicked me because the thrashing ruined my response times) but my in-use memory was 6GB, including random programs.
After closing BF4 through the task manager as it went completely unresponsive, I checked for other programs in my NPPM and found that none accounted for the massive usage of it. I ran RamMap after finding this forum, and confirmed almost exactly 5GB of RAM was NPPM.
Running Windows 8.1 64-bit. Using the BF4 64-bit client. All settings are low or off except AA Post on Low (Running with jaggies is like giving every bush, tree, Tom, and Dave a suit of matching digital camo)
Originally I quit BF4 because of bugs, assuming they'd be fixed by the time the DLCs were coming out again as promised.. Considering this bug seems to have been reported back before that claim, I'm pretty unsatisfied. (Citation: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/12/04/battlefield-4-problems-halt-future-projects-and-expansions )
Though I can praise the game for running much better on this laptop computer after all the fixes and netcode updates put into place, my friends seem unlikely to be convinced the game is of good quality. I'm one of the few in my gaming group willing to buy the occasional EA game, but I haven't really enjoyed one since Bad Company 2, and my reactions to them as of late seem to distance my group further from EA published games..
I shared my issues with a software engineer friend from the group, and after we both concluded the only method to empty the 5GB of NPPM is via a restart, he's now convinced the game's too poorly coded to ever purchase. Though I would enjoy playing alongside my friends in a squad now and then, I don't think I could ever convince them to purchase it at full price anymore, let alone at sale price.
