Smooth animation in wpf

I have an application, implemented in WPF, that presents various media on full screen, such as movies, images, text etc.
these views can be presented in a slide-show, much like in PowerPoint.
each transition between two views can be animated so that it blends from one view to another in different ways. I use transparency in different forms for this, either through a OpacityMask with GradientBrush, where the different stops are animated or I animate the Opacity property directly on the view-panels.
I addition to this I have a banner/ticker/marquee with text that scrolls over the lower part of the screen from right to left. The text background is semi-transparent.

The problem is that during the transition animations the scolling is very jerky, and even when only showing a movie in the background the scrolling is not perfectly smooth. I want the banner to scroll perfectly smoothly regardless of the background, as can be seen in advertisement displays in super markets for instance.

My computer is dual core 2.00 GHz Intel with 2 GB RAM and running vista.

Is this the kind of performance that can be expected from WPF? Or is there a way to accellerate the animation(s). Is there for instance a way to synchronize the two animations better, or forcing/enabling more of the computations to be made on the graphics card instead of in memory? I have also seen that you can plug in DirectX-scripts written in HLSL. Is this the way to go to make the animations smoother?

See exampel code for animating the transitions between two views below

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public override void BringIn()
		{
			NameScope.SetNameScope(fadeInPanel.Parent, new NameScope());
			fadeInPanel.RegisterName(fadeInPanel.Name, fadeInPanel);
			DoubleAnimation animation = new DoubleAnimation();
			animation.From = 1;
			animation.To = 0;
			animation.Duration = new Duration(new TimeSpan(Duration.Ticks / 2));
			Storyboard sb = new Storyboard();
			sb.Children.Add(animation);
			Storyboard.SetTargetName(animation, fadeInPanel.Name);
			Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(animation, new PropertyPath(Panel.OpacityProperty));
			sb.Completed += new EventHandler(sb_bringInCompleted);
			sb.Begin(fadeInPanel);
		}
 
		public override void BringOut()
		{
			fadeOutPanel.Opacity = 0;
			((ViewPanel)FromPanel).Mount(fadeOutPanel);
			NameScope.SetNameScope(fadeOutPanel.Parent, new NameScope());
			fadeOutPanel.RegisterName(fadeOutPanel.Name, fadeOutPanel);
			DoubleAnimation animation = new DoubleAnimation();
			animation.From = 0;
			animation.To = 1;
			animation.Duration = new Duration(new TimeSpan(Duration.Ticks / 2));
			Storyboard sb = new Storyboard();
			sb.Children.Add(animation);
			Storyboard.SetTargetName(animation, fadeOutPanel.Name);
			Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(animation, new PropertyPath(Panel.OpacityProperty));
			sb.Completed += new EventHandler(sb_bringOutCompleted);
			sb.Begin(fadeOutPanel);
		}