Serren: Something I think a lot of people forget (or don't know) is that No Man's Sky not only uses procedural generation heavily, but it uses a voxel-based engine. You can't compare performance directly to a standard 3D polygonal engine with static assets.
I'm not sure if there is a single performance killer in NMS. These are some of the settings I use:
Procedural texture generation can be pretty taxing, which is why I run texture quality at "high" instead of "ultra".
FXAA, TAA or TAA+FXAA all seem to run ok for me, but I only use FXAA as TAA blurs too much.
HBAO doesn't have much of a performance impact on my system, which is surprising since SSAO is usually the first thing I disable in other games to dramatically improve performance at a negligible (sometimes undesired) visual expense.
Finally I have reflections set to low, which makes a huge difference on ocean worlds without really hurting visuals. I have seen some people trying to do screenshot comparisons with this setting, but they were actually looking at the environment and specular mapped textures, not reflections.
I also have vsync disabled, but I do that for most games to improve input latency anyhow.
Ah, now see I forgot about Voxel Generation, that explains a lot of it.
my 3.4 Ghz i7-7700 shouldn't have "That" much of an issue, but I suspect it's my 4Gb 1050 that is doing it.
running it at default is great, but turning of AA, V-sync, and HBAO make running on Ultra a smooth 60 in most cases.