I'm working on some vision upgrades, and it includes a zoom feature that basically just lets you adjust your field of view via a hotkey, giving the appearance of zoom. What I've noticed though is that when you zoom with a weapon, the items that get rendered actually change as if you've moved closer - actors that were previously invisible show up, when before they weren't even a speck on the horizon. Since my zoom feature just expands a narrower section of your view to fit the screen, it doesn't produce this effect, meaning you can see the terrain off in the distance but actors and anything of interest remain invisible. I've tried tweaking a few .ini settings via setnumericinisetting in an attempt to manipulate the draw distance:

fFarDistance:Display
fLODFadeOutMultActors:LOD
fLODFadeOutMultObjects:LOD
fLODFadeOutMultItems:LOD
fFadeDistance:DistantLOD

but none seems to have an effect. I've noticed that tweaking some ini settings during gameplay won't produce an effect until the next time you load the game (like the show crosshair setting) so that may be the problem, but if someone knows which setting I should be testing out it would save me some time. Looking through the .ini files there are a lot of potential candidates.