I would guess for most applications that the performance difference between the two is academic. I use both lists and arrays all the time and both are very fast. Lists are backed by arrays, so they will be no faster than arrays.
I have a demo program that does the following and times the performance
1) Converts the ResultSet to an ArrayList,
2) Converts the ArrayList to an Object[][] array.
If you run go to this page you can run this program:
SQL query/sort page You can see the performance numbers in the following report.
JAMon Performance Report 1) com.fdsapi.ResultSetUtils.resultSetToList() - times performance of converting a ResultSet to an ArrayList
2) com.fdsapi.ResultSetUtils.listToObjectArray() - times performance of converting the ArrayList to an Object[][]
As you can see both are very fast, and 2) is so fast that it is difficult to time.
I would make my choice of whether to use a List or an array based on other criteria besides performance.