Described herein are, among other things, techniques for implementing a dual detail encoding scheme in a distributed display system. At the host computer, an application may render a frame for a scene at a first resolution. The host computer may generate a two-dimensional (2D) array of pixels for the frame, encode the 2D array of pixels, and transmit the encoded pixel data to the display device. The 2D array of pixels comprises, for each eye, a copy of the frame downscaled to a second resolution less than the first resolution, and a copy of a subregion of the scene. At the display device, the encoded pixel data is decoded to obtain the 2D array of pixels for the frame, which is modified by enlarging the copies of the frame so that images can be generated using the enlarged copies of the frame and the copies of the subregion with blending.