Wondering if anyone else can reproduce this before I submit it to VMware.
I noticed that the new VMware Workstation 15.5 is not respecting at least the "low priority" option for running VMs that do not have input grabbed. Here is how to check it out.
In VMware Workstation, go to Edit → Preferences, select "Priority" from the left, and select the option for "Input ungrabbed: Low".
Settings can be overridden for a particular VM. Go to settings on a VM. In the Options tab, Advanced section, confirm that "Input ungrabbed" is either set to "Default" or "Low".
Fire up the VM.
On the host, open Task Manager and go to the Details tab. Find vmware-vmx.exe. Right-click on it and expand the "Set priority" menu and you will see that the process is currently running with priority "Normal" and not "Low". You can set it to "Low" manually, but it will only remain at "Low" priority until the VM input is grabbed and ungrabbed again; after that it will return to "Normal" priority.
I know that I checked this on a prior version of VMware Workstation and it worked as expected. I am pretty sure but not positive that I checked on VMware Workstation 15.1 and it was good, so I believe that it has broken in 15.5. However, if anyone reads this who is using a version older than 15.5 I would be interested to see your results so that I can confirm whether this actually broke in 15.5 or maybe a little earlier.
There is also an option to set priority to "High" when the input is grabbed. That seems to be working as expected. I checked by adding the "base priority" column in Task Manager and then looking at it while I grabbed and released input to the VM. Grabbing input sets the priority to "High", but ungrabbing it sets it to "Normal" even when I asked for "Low".
