A head-mounted display (HMD) system may include a HMD with a housing and a pair of display panels, mounted within the housing, that are counterrotated in orientation. A compositor of the HMD system may also be configured to provide camera pose data with counterrotated camera orientations to an executing application (e.g., a video game application), and to resample the frames received from the application, with or without rotational adjustments in the clockwise and counterclockwise directions depending on whether the display panels of the HMD are upright-oriented or counterrotated in orientation. A combined approach may use the counterrotated camera orientations in combination with counterrotated display panels to provide a HMD with optimized display performance.