[R-COM]Hulabi wrote:It's not really a performance issue, it's just that the image inside the scope would be digitally zoomed in and thus lower resolution - would look worse and worse the more you wanted to zoom in.
If it was done that way, no scope would be any better than ironsights, as long as you're capable of distinguishing individual pixels on your monitor. (The dot on a question mark is about one pixel. Can you see it?)
Games like Insurgency (the Source mod, not the PR game type) rerender the scene to get true zoom, but that requires rendering the view twice, once for unzoomed and once for zoomed. Unlike Squad, Insurgency runs on the older Source engine, so it has extra performance to spare on a feature that would theoretically cut your FPS in half.*
BF2 is also an older engine, though, and there appears to be a proof of concept of this working, so it should be feasible. It would definitely make the game more difficult to play for people on low end computers, unless it was optional. (Insurgency, the game, is all CQB so you never really need a scope.) For this reason, I don't miss it in PR.
* Since the scope doesn't take up the whole screen, some performance can be saved by trimming the rendered area, and possibly more advanced optimizations. However there is still overhead, such as the render/detail distance having to be increased so things don't look blurry/chunky/invisible. (In some games you can get lag when you zoom because it has to load entire models that the game previously considered too far to see.)