It explodes, instantly killing the user.

@theagentd, that made me rofl! +1 for you sir

theagentd is right. Pick a target level of machine and devlop for that. Get it fast enough for that, and don't officially support anything slower.

Also you need to be careful with java2d. It will often fall back to software rendering and  be really really slow. I would tend to switch to lwjgl or something like slick2d.

Removed..

Hmmh,

Im dont fully agree that software rendering part, my oldie GF6200FX seems to handle all graphics2d commands, i dont have CPU load when increasing scale rotate or any other commands with bufferedimages or drawstrings, and all my bufferedimages are RGBA not compatibles ?

@Jari Särö

Try it on different machines. What a 3d card can do and what java2d, a library designed to render the same across different hardware targets, uses or does are *not* the same thing.

I have tested this in many situations across many different machines and jvms. Good frame rates in one place does not mean anything about others. Java2d was not designed with games in mind. It was designed with platform independent GUI rendering in mind.

Now consider that you have zero control over the JVM used for an applet.

Just as an example, my JDoodle Jump game (which uses a LOT of alpha, AA, rotating, scaling) runs at 70-80 FPS on the cruddy school computers (Pentium CPU and integrated Intel GPU) and 150-200 FPS on my old laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo and integrated Intel GPU).