I have a 2D platformer game which runs at set at 60 fps, i only update tiles that are one the screen around the player, so about 12x8 tiles which are 64x64 in size. It runs fine but when i animate the tile by giving them an image they grab from another class, every time the update they tick to see if its time to update their animation if so, they grab a different image but this makes the game lag, the water animation has 3 slides each one is just blue with some different noise.

I also draw the player pixel by pixel and depending on the tiles hes standing on change the RGBA of each pixel to make it cool, e.g. i add transparency when in water so it looks like it.
tl;dr it only really slows down when >60% of the screen are water tiles but i have no idea how else i would implement them :S

I havent done any anti-aliasing so that cant be it, also when i disable the water affecting the player sprite so the player is just drawn normal over the water it is still slow :/

aghh thanks :/ this means im going to have to go lurk the Jogl forum now and buy a new book, gah. Thanks though 

Yeaa i could, thinking of using doing my A level computing project using JOGL though. Because i could see an examiner who doesn't know what hes talking about thinking "hes using a library! That means he practically didn't do anything himself!"

Yea all the water tiles access 3 static images in a loader class that are loaded from the start and each cycle through pretty randomly, with the picture changing around every 300ms.

Water tiles are drawn first then player is drawn translucent ontop of the tile, as play is smaller i thought be better to do this way round(less pixels to shade).
So the tiles are drawn fully opaque, but the images that are drawn are basicly 64x64 of randomly bluey coloured pixels, i think this might be whats slowing it down

That's an EXCELLENT article that everyone should read.

The last point is also the most important. The BufferedImage returned by ImageIO MUST be turned into a compatible image or else it will not be drawn efficiently. Line 87 shows how to create a BufferedImage and line 107 shows how to copy a BufferedImage into a compatible BufferedImage.