Sluggish Core Animation

in development i'm realizing that my animations can be pretty sluggish if a lot are happening at once. is that the difference between CA and OpenGL? or perhaps it's my methods to moving frames (touchesMoves continuously hammers away at setFrame: of a rect that can be as large as the screen). even CGAffineTrasformMakeTranslation moving a "large" CGRect can get pretty jagged. it seems that the smaller the CGRect, the smoother the animation, and this seems true with development on Mac OS X as well.

is OpenGL really that much faster than Core Animation?