Faster tile drawing.

Hello :smiley: Im programming a dungeon crawler in Slick2D and i have stumbled upon a big wall X.X Yes, it’s the FPS.
I am currently drawing (the visible part of) 4 tile layers + 1 lighting layer (there are also other things like gui & entity systems). I have a stable 90-120 FPS but considering the amount of logic that still needs to be added (AI,NPC’S,pets,combat system,buff system,spell system, particle effects etc. etc.) i need something around 500.
Now i have seen THIS AWESOME article :smiley: http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/rendering-tiles-fast-isometric-too/25292/view.html but unfortunately my graphics card doesn’t support OpenGL 3.0 :C (everything is working besides the texture loading - OpenGL 3.0 ). Now my question is Is there any way to achieve the same performance-boost with OpenGL 2.0? If there is, could you please explain? Im kinda newbie to OpenGL.

-Alex