DMA vs MSGDMA

The old DMA is quite limited especially when it comes to bursting so if throughput is important you may want to go with the mSGDMA for that alone. If you leave out the descriptor fetching engine then they both have similar frontends where a host just writes to a few registers and kicks a go bit to get data movements started. The burst issue with the old DMA that I don't think ever got fixed was once you enabled bursting you were limited to transferring only a single burst of data. I bring this up because you posted this thread in the SoC section so I'm assuming you are DMA'ing data from the HPS memory space which as an AXI NoC which is turned for bursts and not single beat transactions.

Where does the big image originate? In other words is it already in main memory or is it stored in a flash file system? Also are you really talking about HPS systems or is this perhaps a Nios II system?