That makes no sense…hardware acceleration increases performance, unless there is something wrong with the D3D backend of Java2D…
I know! It makes no sense at all! …but based off my experience it works… you just have to be using awt / swing and/or regular Graphics… not Graphics2D or OpenGL / DirectX
You were most likely doing something completely wrong, because what you said makes no sense at all 
There are no more Graphics instances. Any objects of type “Graphics” that you see are actually “Graphics2D” now.
Swing is built using Java2D, meaning that underneath, it uses Graphics2D to draw JButtons, JList, etc…
Lastly, you can’t control when Java2D uses hardware acceleration or not. It may decide to fall back to software rendering at any time.