Hardware Why does GBA have "backgrounds" and "sprites"?

[therealbenwiley]

I'm learning to program the GBA and one thing I don't really understand is, why did they reserve one portion of VRAM for "background" tiles and another portion for "sprite" tiles? Why not just choose a single tiling method and stick with it (i.e. background tiles, because sprite tiling is probably too limited)? Is there an historical or performance-related reason for it?

 

[cirote3]

Sprite and background tiles are stored in different VRAM banks. This division should make it faster for the PPU to access them simultaneously.

 

[therealbenwiley]

Yeah but why isn't the API for manipulating them the same?