Java 2D Speed

The issues over the speed of Java 2D operations mirror my discussion about the use of managed images and VolatileImages, since speed depends on which operations are hardware accelerated, and the hardware accelerated options depends on the OS.

On Windows, hardware acceleration is mostly restricted to the basic 2D operations such as filling, copying rectangular areas, line drawing (vertical and horizontal only), and basic text rendering. Unfortunately, the fun parts of Java 2Dsuch as curves, anti-aliasing, and compositingall use software rendering. In Linux/Solaris, so long as OpenGL buffers are supported, most elements of Java 2D are accelerated.

The situation described here is for J2SE 5.0 and will improve. The best check is to profile your code. A Java 2D-specific profiling approach is described in Chapter 6, based around the switching on of Java 2D's low-level operation logging.