Improving performance in my game

[amablue]

I'm writing a sprite based fighting game and whenever I draw large sprites with transparency, like the stage itself, the game slows way down. When I draw a few smaller sprites it works fine though. I just read the .png files with ImageIO.read(filename) and then when I draw them I just use the standard g.drawImage(...) function.

While googling around for a solution I saw suggestions to use -Dsun.java2d.opengl=True, but I keep getting the error message "Could not enable OpenGL pipeline for default config on screen 0" which appears to be because I have an intel chipset.

The other option that I know of is to replace the rendering code I currently have with JOGL. I've got JOGL set up on my computer and I can run it just fine. I've done OpenGL programming in C++ for about a year (I had two elective courses at my school in graphics programming in openGL), but I've been having trouble loading textures. I can load images just fine, but when I try to turn them into a texture with TextureIO.newTexture(...) I get a null pointer.

I don't even know if that's the way to do it correctly though, it's hard to find up to date tutorials. Anyone have tips or code I can look at or tutorials on how to get 2D sprites to run effeciently?

[zammbi]

All transparency is slow in Java 2D. Myself I use:
System.setProperty("sun.java2d.translaccel", "true")
to speed it up, but you can also use the opengl flag too. But still I can run my 2D tile game well without the flag also.