For this problem in preticular is Xfire- i confirmed in the past and confirmed again in windows 8.1. here is the problem with battlefield 4 and xfire
Xfire itself as a program is not the problem, but the problem is the detection service of Xfire, when xfire is detecting a game it runs a script through your operating system and this goes through you video driver. This is causing the driver to fail and to restart.
The solution to this fix is to turn of detection services on Xfire or to completely not run Xfire all together when playing BF4.
Any other probelms with crashing not connected to xfire is the driver being absoulte crap... like you said