April 2016
My laptop has 8GB RAM, 2GB Nvidia 840M GPU, i7-5500U CPU - Running 64 Bit Windows 10.
Here is a link to the laptop model I am using.
YouTube video of the same system (with an i5 CPU) getting 20% higher FPS than I ever got.
All week I've been playing BF4 without an issue. My framerate has been 40 or higher at all times (with the odd exception). Today I played 1 or 2 games, and as it transitioned to the next game the whole thing froze. I had the black screen between games with the flashing "_" but the whole system was unresponsive, incl CTRL+ALT+DEL. After a 2 mins I had to just hold the power button to reboot the computer.
After it rebooted, I logged back into a server and all of a sudden I was getting 14fps, with the odd spike to 16 if I was lucky (30Hz server with 1 player, on Operation Locker, and others). It will often stutter like when you knock a stylus on a vinyl record while loading now, too (the music will pl-pl-play the sa-sa-same note over an-an-and over).
I've tried the following (mixing and matching where relevant):
NOTHING has improved the FPS at all.
I am currently in the middle of re-downloading the game to reinstall it, but I'm very doubtful it will change anything.
What's gone wrong? How can I fix it?
April 2016
It sounds like it's using the HD5500 IGP on the i7 despite the settings to force the 840m.
Try to confirm it's using the 840m with monitoring software like Open Hardware Monitor, GPU-Z, or Afterburner (without RiviaTuner because it causes issues with Origin in Game if not set to None-Detection).