The hit from the patches to the Meltdown bug is mitigated by the PCID/INVPCID in Intel CPUs which AMD CPUs do not have.

Do you have Hyper-V enabled on the Windows host (presumably it is Windows as you mentioned Unity mode)? With Workstation 15.5.5 and higher, a user level monitor (ULM) using the Microsoft Hypervisor API is used instead of the ring 0 VMM. The ULM would be slower in performance. You can verify this in the vmware.log

vmx| I005: Monitor Mode: CPL0

If you see ULM the slower VMM is used while CPL0 is the regular ring 0 VMM.

You could disable Hyper-V by following this KB.
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2146361