I have tried the previous version of NMS on my system with mild to low settings and experienced perfect performance. No frame drops and no lag, but with the latest update, I had to update my drivers and set ALL graphics options to the lowest setting and off for everything else, lower the resolution, and now the game is BARELY playable. I still haven't left the first planet so I don't even know if I'm going to be able to play on certain planets or in space. The performance drop is ridiculous. Devs, please PLEASE focus less on graphics and more on performance.

The thread "Pathfinder performance issues" from back in April '17 has some settings and discussion which might help.

I've found the Waking Titan (1.38) update to be quite stable and playable even with a not top of the line vid card. I do experience some perceptable slowdowns on planets with large herds of critters. Probably less of a video issue than just grinding out all of the procedural generation when I'm being mobbed by crowd of canivorous teddy bears.

Do be sure that you've deleted the shader cache after updating your video drivers. It probably wouldn't hurt to delete that cache whenever you've made a significant change to the video settings as well. There will be a one-time hit on startup while the cache is regenerated but it ought to help out thereafter.