oNyx - Why is the other drawImage slightly faster? I looked at the javadoc between the different methods and it doesn't seem to mention anything about it being faster.
I would presume because that method is manually specifying the clip rectangle, where as your method requires the API to work it out for itself.
I wouldn't expect the difference between the two to be large however. (a few extra if's per image draw, thats all)
btw, why are you breaking the source image into tiles anyway?
I would imagine rendering 100s of different tiles should be slower than rendering many different portions of the same image.