Java2D Paths and Particles

I have been playing around with Java2D lately. The two main things that interest me is implementing the 3d concept of particles in java2d and using GeneralPaths for animation. Here is a quick demo I made of my little particle engine. The number in the top left is the number of particles currently being rendered. The applet dynamically increases and decreases that number depending on load/framerate. As you can see in its current applet for it starts to cap out at about 200-300 particles. I have written a Frame version that takes advantage of the OpenGL pipeline and for that one I can render close to 6000 particles at a time.

Here is my demo for moving a image on a path. I have a framework created to do this but this demo does not use it.