I make extensive use of -drawRect: to do some nice animations. A timer tries to fire 30 times per second with -setNeedsDisplay, but it feels like just 20 times. Also I can't use -setNeedsDisplayInRect: because the animation covers the entire thing.

Would it help to take some of those drawing operations out of -drawRect: and move them to a subview? -drawRect has to do less then, but instead the OS will have more work with compositing views.

Is there a rule of thumb which one is more worse? I remember from an apple text that they claimed Core Animation doesn't redraw during animation. So is that their secret of speed? Using subviews in animations?