Thanks for your help!  Once I switched to active rendering, and used VolatileImages, my framerate jumped to ~250 fps!  
  Thanks again, this forum is great, I wish I would have found it sooner.

Cory

Hi,
   I need any advice to squeeze more performance out of my application.  My app receives a 2-d array of doubles, from which I need to create an image.  It receives a new array once every second.  This image is then continuously rendered (trying to maintain 30fps) to a JPanel, each frame scrolling down.  (i.e. to represent a top-down view of the ground scrolling by).
  I am currently converting the 2-d array of doubles to a 2-d array of int pixels, then create a BufferedImage (TYPE_INT_ARGB) and call setRGB with the int array.
  Then another thread is calling repaint() which scrolls the image at the desired fps.   From what I can gather from this forum is that I may not be getting accelerated images, and that would greatly increase the painting of the image each frame.    Is there a way to create an accelerated image from this int array (as opposed to loading it from a file)?

Any help is appreciated,

Cory