What would be a good way to speed up Java 2D HUD painting?

I'm currently painting my HUD with Java 2D, as was also described in the original HUD tutorial in the wiki. The reason why I'm using this obviously slow method is that I need to paint many texts, boxes etc. that are updated every frame. However, the pure Java 2D part of repainting the BufferedImage that is used as HUD takes about 40 - 60 milliseconds, which takes the entire framerate down quite a lot.



Some things that I might try:


  • Only repaint the HUD every N frames.
  • Do all the Java 2D stuff in a background thread, and grab the latest image from the rendering thread.
  • Break the HUD into multiple, smaller images.



    Would these be good choices to get around this, or would I be better off dumping Java 2D entirely and just picking some other GUI library which uses OpenGL?

I thought about this thread in the SLICK2D forum where Kevglass talked brievly about his jme based game where a thingle pass using SLICK is used :



http://slick.javaunlimited.net/viewtopic.php?t=1227&highlight=jme



PS: if my comment is irrelevent, just ignore it  8)