Im making a tile based game with a layout similar to pokemon. I have a test map made using Tiled map editor and was wondering if i should just create an image from the ground layers after parsing the level file and draw that as opposed to drawing hundreds of tiles. I could make it draw only a few tiles in any direction from the player if i don't create an image but I don't know if drawing 150 tiles every frame would be faster than drawing a 4096x image every frame.
Ah I figured out a good way to do this. Slick2D contains classed for loading Tiled maps with a tmx extension. It also has tons of methods for managing the map and drawing a portion if you have a large map to increase performance.