Hints for graphics performance

You can get 60 FPS on both desktop and laptop machines by using OpenGL rendering (see View/Enable OpenGL rendering checkbox). But it is also important that your graphics card is set to the proper OpenGL mode. For instance, on a Thinkpad T43p, with ATI Mobility FireGL V3200 card, it is much faster to be in 32 bit mode rather than 16 bit mode.
If you doesn't use 32 bit mode the frame rate slows from 60 FPS to as little as 15 FPS with lots of events, suggesting that some hardware acceleration is not functioning.
The use of a decent contemporary graphics card is also important. After replacing the Matrox P650 in the desktop machine with a recent ATI low end gaming card, rendering performance increased dramatically. Some built in graphics cards do not provide hardware OpenGL support and are much slower.
Hintscan be gotten from the diagnositics printed on startup of jAERViewer. In the Thinkpad case, I see the following that indicates hardware OpenGL version 2.0 is running:

Apr 17, 2006 9:55:47 AM ch.unizh.ini.caviar.graphics.OpenGLRetinaCanvas init
INFO: INIT GL IS: com.sun.opengl.impl.GLImpl
GL_VENDOR: ATI Technologies Inc.
GL_RENDERER: MOBILITY FireGL V3200 Pentium 4 (SSE2)
GL_VERSION: 2.0.5285GL

Another thing with ATI cards on laptops: ATI has a thing called Powerplay. It should be set to Maximum Performance. The ATI display control panel then looks like this