I recently purchased a license for VMware Workstation and have been pleasantly surprised with the increased - or seemingly increased - performance as compared to VMware Player. Most notable has been the audio/video playback on Windows 10. In (2) tests that I ran a few months back with Player (on the same, exact hardware), both Diablo III and Cox Contour (website) were plagued with stuttering and audio lag; now these problems have nearly completely disappeared.

All of the above have been run with v16 of Player/Workstation, host is Linux Mint 20.1. Am I imagining this performance bump, or did my $199 really make that much of a difference? Either way, it's been a great investment.