This is an interesting conundrum - with an elephant in the room.
I'm out in the black, heading out to an unexplored region and I've stopped and had a look at a few planets along the way and here are my observations:
1) Some planets seem to have terrible issues with terrain pop-in as you approach, other planets you never see it. It seems the further I get from humans, the less it happens.
2) There seems to be an issue with rendering of planets at orbital distances, with repeated textures and apparent terrain. Part of the elephant is that I've not seen anything quite as egregious as some of the examples here, but I won't deny it happens.
3) On Station Performance: There are some issues, I get a significant hit to performance while on foot in a station, just docked and at the station menu is about the same as EDH. Again, this one is elephant-related as I've not seen quite the level of impact that some people have.
4) On Planet/Base performance: Here I get 40-60+ fps for the most part, unless there is a lot of infantry action around me or I run in to a burning building, that can drag me down to the teens for fps. This is one area where I'm not sure I got any different levels of performance to anyone else, maybe having gamed since before 3d was even done in hardware, I have different expectations..
And there's my problem, I'm seeing some of the issues, but not all.. Or I'm not seeming to. I'm not claiming that it all OK, it's not, but from reading here and other places, it seems like there are some variables to what the cause is.. It's clearly not hardware. Or is it?