320 x 240 at 16-bit is 150 KB, 153,600 bytes. That's about 60% of RP2040 RAM, 30% of RP235X's. Those halve to 30% and 15% if you are able to live with 8-bit colour. That also has the advantage of fewer bytes needing to be sent every frame if doing a full update which will double the potential frame rate.The conversation here is making me wish I had gotten a model that includes space to add some PSRAM - even 16-bit color at 320x480 is likely going to eat a lot of SRAM.
If you have your 8-bit colour as an index into a colour palette lookup table you can expand each as you output the frame buffer. That will increase the update time, drop the frame rate, but may be acceptable. The lookup table won't be larger than 1 KB.
Looking at the datasheet it appears the display doesn't support 8-bit colour directly, just 12-bit RGB444, 16-bit RGB565 and 18-bit RGB666, so maybe go for 16-bit in the frame buffer initially, suck it up for memory used, and just get it working to start with.
Once you have anything working you can start experimenting and thinking about how to optimise and improve things. When I had an LCD attached to my Pi it took over a minute to update the display through bit-banging in Python but I was delighted and well on my way. That you are asking about flickering suggests you already are.
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Fri Oct 10, 2025 8:08 pm