Seemingly JPanel buffering whoas...

Question

I have a JPanel which is being drawn on every frame by my "engine". I admit that I am pushing quite a few pixels to the screen (800*600)+ each frame, but even when I am not pushing anything the double buffering done by the JPanel seems to increadibly hinder my framerates. I can try to describe what I'm doing...
A " Game" class handles all the pixel creations and sends each Sprite or whatever object to be drawn to the "Engine" (another class)
The engine keeps a queue of all the pixels to be drawn and when the frame has been complted by the "Game" class, drains the queue and draws onto the JPanel. The JPanel is then triggered from a timer to check if the engine has finished drawing and repaints appropriately.
The mysterious thing to me is, the transistion from my "Game" class to the "Engine" and the drawing of the engine is almost instant while the double JPanel takes forever to reguarly repaint itself....

Answer 1

hm...alright thanks for all your input so far...let me try and lay out the outline of the way I am doing things, its simplified to an extreme but should show what I'm doing....
public class Game{
public Game(Engine engine)
this.engine = engine;
public void doFrame()
engine.addToQueue(SpriteToBeDrawn);
}//end class Game
public class GameWindow{
public GameWindow()
timer = new Timer(delay);
timer.start();
engine = new Engine();
public void actionPerformed()
if (game.isFrameFinised() )
repaint();
game.doFrame();
public void paintComponent(Graphics g)
engine.setPanelToDrawOn(g);
engine.drainQueue();
}//end class GameWindow
public class Engine()
public void drainQueue()
drawSprite()
public void drawSprite()
//creates an Image out of
a Color[][] and places it on the
screen
}///end class Engine
Remember, even if i choose to draw sprites or not, the frame rate is still slow (10-20FPS)
Thanks for the help, and sorry if this is just disgusting code :-)