I have been continuing the port of Magicosm to Xith3D and the implementation of the necessary features in Xith3D. I got the nested skydomes working tonight. Thats 5 nested domes with alpha blending and moving clouds. It is rendering at 500 fps in fullscreen 1200x1000, and I am not even using vertex arrays yet for triangle strips.
All I can say is that I am heartened regarding the performance of Java and JOGL.
Take that Java3D 
That really sounds cool! I expect some real performance/smoothness improvements when we can port FlyingGuns to Xith3D.
Giving me better control on the rendering, esp. smoothness, which always has been a difficult point with Java3D, might be much easier to accomplish.
This reminds me of the first test I did with Jogl. A spinning textured lit cube at 1280x960 pixels… I got well over 2000 fps.
I had to check my math twice. That’s just insane, when you’re used to Java3D type speeds.
Oh, and I really hope that those 500 fps is “just” with the skydome, and not with full terrain rendering. Heh
[edit: I just realized I did that test with LWJGL, not Jogl.]
texture compression speeds are unreal on the speed side also. the speed is fantastic. for my movie textures code quicktime is the bottle neck not jogl.