core animation - fine if you want to do one thing - and use the entire resources of the computer - not so great if you need multiple layers to do stuff

same for quartz composer- looks great in theory - but as soon as you start to get stuff to look good you dont get many frames per second out of it -
watch the frame counter it soon drops down to less than 25fps - and thats just with one 'layer'-

these things all use the same technology as catalyst - but they dont have to work with stability in real-time on shows -