How can I improve the performance of java games?

You could try and tune javaw. To begin with i assume you run it like this :

C:\jdk6\bin\javaw.exe -jar "C:\jedit\jedit.jar"

To add parameters for tuning, it should then look like this :

C:\jdk6\bin\javaw.exe -Xmx256m -Xms256m -jar "C:\jedit\jedit.jar"

The above example allocates 256 MB heap memory for Java.

Further examples can be found in the Java Tuning White Paper.

Good luck :)