Some game systems did this too. For instance the Gameboy Advance had DMA, and it was used all the time because if you were eating up your cycles on copying memo

Some game systems did this too. For instance the Gameboy Advance had DMA, and it was used all the time because if you were eating up your cycles on copying memory, you would run out of time to process your game logic before your vertical blank ended and the system started drawing onscreen. I also saw it used to save memory. Onscreen sprites had to be placed into a small memory-mapped address range, so instead of putting every character animation frame into this space and using it all up, I saw just one block designated for the character, and it was animated by DMAing the frames sequentially into that space.